"The sound of science; Brown professor markets CDs that aim to stimulate, soothe the brain" by S.I. Rosenbaum, Globe Correspondent | February 22, 2010
PROVIDENCE - Seth Horowitz has super hearing.
As a toddler, chicken pox invaded his ears, bursting both eardrums. When they healed, his hearing range had shifted higher. Today, he can hear a computer monitor humming three rooms away. He can hear bats chattering.
He also is an insomniac; any slight noise can jolt him awake.
This might explain why Horowitz, an assistant research professor of neuroscience at Brown University, has spent years in search of a sound that can put people to sleep.
Oh, that's easy. Just hand them a copy of the Boston Globe. They'll be out in no time.
He thinks he’s found it, along with a sound that makes you nervous, a sound that makes you concentrate, and a sound that makes you sick to your stomach.
Oh, you heard the pfffft! Newspaper will also do that.
Now he and a partner, composer Lance Massey, are trying to market sounds as a way to combat insomnia and other maladies. They are developing CDs with sounds they believe can hijack the auditory system and use it to stimulate different parts of the brain....
Remember the controversy over the subliminal messages advertisers were inserting into department stores in the 1970s?
They have had 40 years to improve the methods, folks.
Makes you see the "impulse" buy in a whole new light, no?
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The trick was keeping a listener from paying too much attention to the music, Horowitz said. It has to be background noise. So Massey composed music that wasn’t too dramatic.
In 2001, Horowitz and Massey had their first concert, at a New York club. When they played a piece they called “Vertigo Tour,’’ the audience started to wobble. One man fell out of his chair.
“We knew we had something,’’ Horowitz said.
(Later, Horowitz said, he played that piece for his boss at Stony Brook, who promptly vomited. Not long afterward, Horowitz left Stony Brook for Brown.)
So there actually is a brown note, huh?
Horowitz and Massey never tested the effects of their sounds in a scientifically rigorous way. “It was all kind of fun, a hobby,’’ Horowitz explained. “It’s what I do outside of the lab.’’
I sense some sort of illness, don't you?
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At Stony Brook, Horowitz had done research for NASA on insomnia in astronauts. He had found that a low-frequency, low-amplitude sound - the roar of traffic, for example - seemed to stimulate the brain’s sleep centers. He and Massey made a second CD, mixing sleep-inducing noise in with classical music.
So that is what does it.
The friend called them the first night: It hadn’t worked. The second night, he called again, jubilant. His son was out like a light. The first night, his son had paid too much attention to the music for it to have an effect, Horowitz guesses. He and Massey packaged the CD and made it available from their website....
Well, I'm not an advertiser from brainwashing.
It does look like he has bats in his belfry, doesn't it?
Of course, if you holler mind control or see birds, so to speak, you are a "crazy conspiracy theorist."
