Neuro-scientist Andrew Smart says that ambient sound can transport your mind to a delicious parallel universe, and enthuses about a new web installation, Foundsoundscape, by artist Janek Schaefer

THE BEST DESCRIPTION I can come up with for the sound artist Janek Schaefer’s latest project called foundsoundscape is magic. The piece is an online radio broadcast of sound files sent to him by one hundred of his fellow sound finders, including luminaries like Brian Eno. “Using over 1000 calm & curious location recordings captured by 100 recordists,” the website explains, “the sounds were simply edited, and then played back three at a time at various volumes in shuffle mode, and the result is never the same twice.”

Schaefer curated the content and stitched together an endlessly evolving collage of sounds – muffled applause, birds chirping, billiard balls colliding, various colours of noise (noise has different colours – which I will get to below).

Go to the site and just start listening. Leave it on in the background on your computer while you work. If you are stuck in a mind-numbing office cubicle filling in rows of spreadsheets or preparing the dullest and most meaningless Powerpoint presentation known to man, foundscoundscape will transport your mind to somewhere under the sea, to a field, to a vague urban-sounding environment, a cocktail party in outer space? The magic of the piece consists in how it plays on your mind – you at once feel calmed by the steady stream of sounds but you are also drawn into mysterious worlds. Perhaps like being hypnotized. You feel unfocused and relaxed but intensely curious about what kind of sound will appear next. It somehow is never boring yet it may lull you to sleep (or inspire a poem). Images may bubble up in your mind in a kind of synesthetic merger of the visual and the auditory. You constantly wonder – oh where was this bit recorded? I want to go there!

I spoke with Schaefer about the piece and about his approach to music, art and life in general. I felt an instant affinity to his quest for serendipity through embracing randomness. Schaefer wanted to create calm with foundsoundscape, but was also after serendipity – a theme he mentions often – serendipity as an art form. In order to be truly open to serendipitous happenings in music, art or writing, one must completely let go and dive into the randomness which underlies everything.

Schaefer admitted that this is terrifying. It is indeed why most of us spent our days avoiding uncertainty, planning for retirement or even next month’s rent. Schaefer bravely avoids all the onerous and often futile planning – in art and life – and the results are often surprisingly wonderful.

Schaefer says, “The key is to not let failures block your embrace of the unknown and to keep dancing around the problem.” He continues, “if I make a mistake on stage, well I just keep making the mistake, and it becomes part of the piece.”

His staring off point as a sound artist was piece called Recorded Delivery in 1995 that he did while studying architecture. Schaefer mailed a sound-activated tape recorder to find out what it was like to be a parcel being shipped through the post – what does a box hear on its journey? The device recorded whenever there was a sound loud enough to activate it. He of course got the normal bangs and noise of the box getting thrown about in trucks and on conveyor belts – but the box also recorded a group of postal workers discussing their supposed hot-blooded sexual exploits of the previous evening in vulgar and graphic detail.

It is these “magic moments” that Schaefer has been after ever since. “I realized early on that I am much more interested in twisting the rules than simply following them.”

“My strength is improvisation. Lately I have been doing discos with kids. Put me in a room with two hundred kids where absolutely anything can happen and I am in my element”, Janek says. These kinds of serendipitous sweetspots are the resonance created by the combination of chance the artist’s keen instincts. But crucially Schaefer opens himself to discovering these moments by listening to what many people dismiss as noise. But why is Schaefer’s foundsoundscape so nice and relaxing?

As a scientist I have long been fascinated by noise and randomness. Noise is typically defined as any unwanted signal or interference. Noise is a nuisance, it corrupts communications lines, it can damage your hearing, cause chronic stress, and in many cities around the world there are strict anti-noise ordinances.

But perhaps counter-intuitively, there are many situations in nature where noise helps. Noise is ubiquitous in the environment, and biological systems have evolved to use noise rather than fight it. It is the biological equivalent of the Judo philosophy of using your opponent’s energy together with your own. In fact, without noise our brains would not be able to function. Our brains are filled with noise, both from the noisy world and from the combined activity of eighty billion neurons randomly firing electrical impulses up to seventeen trillion times per second.

Scientists have discovered a phenomenon called stochastic resonance, which essentially means noise benefit. This means that the system under investigation works better because of noise. In the brain, several studies have demonstrated that noise actually helps keep order in our neural networks by inducing synchronization among neurons. Our sensory organs use noise to amplify weak signals. The key to this resonance is the intensity of the noise – to little noise and the signal cannot be detected, but too much noise overwhelms the senses.

The image of Big Ben below illustrates the concept (from a classic paper by Enrico Simonotto).

The image on the left shows a faint picture of Big Ben, barely visible. Simply by adding noise to each pixel in the image – not adjusting the original signal – the middle image emerges. This is the optimal noise intensity and results from stochastic resonance. In the image on the right, as the noise level increases the signal begins to disappear in the noise.

I mentioned above that noise has different colours – white noise, pink noise, red noise and black noise. These colours are named for the underlying statistical distribution of the noise and the visual colour the noise produces in the visible spectrum. White noise means that each frequency in the noise has a constant energy. Pink noise is also known as 1/f noise – or “one over f” – which is where the energy is inversely proportional to the frequency. This kind of noise has been found in the slight variations in rhythm that human musicians play. Music software adds pink noise to electronic music to “humanize” it. Stochastic resonance can occur with any colour of noise.

Janek Schaefer’s work can be compared with stochastic resonance – he uses noise to find weak signals. A famous problem in perceptual psychology is called the Cocktail Party Problem, which was proposed by psychologist Colin Cherry back in the 1950s. Imagine you are at a cocktail party with background music, the din of several gin-fueled conversations, and you are having a conversation with your friends. You can switch from listening to one friend to another with relative ease. Imagine at the noisy cocktail party your friends’ conversation has become tiresome. You don’t want to be rude by walking away, so you switch your attention to the conversation happening in the group next to your group. You no longer hear what the voices right next to you are saying, but you hear the far more interesting conversation in the other group. Your ears and head have not moved – but your auditory attention has. Human beings have a remarkable ability to selectively attend to one sound source in noisy environments. Despite being studied for more than sixty years, how the human brain solves the cocktail party problem remains a mystery.

However, it likely that stochastic resonance is involved. When our attention shifts to a different audio source, our brains boost the signal by adding the right amount of noise. Foundsoundscape is like entering a strange cocktail party of random objects, people and places. Our attention wanders around the soundscape.

Noise can also help calm the mind – through the very same principles. When I was in graduate school in Sweden, we studied how the right amount of background noise could help children with attention difficulties concentrate. We discovered though that even so-called “normal” children experience a noise benefit but they require much less intense noise.

The noise in Schaefer’s work has the same effect – but given the fact that it has an impulsive quality (technically we would call this a Cauchy distribution) – it allows the mind to drift into a heightened state, which might be achieved through increased synchronization in certain parts of the brain. The impulsiveness of the noise is also what keeps our attention, searching for the next burst of interesting sounds.

I am constantly amazed by artists like Janek Schaefer who can intuitively tap into natural phenomena that science is only beginning to understand. The practical lesson for everyone is to stop and listen to the noise, and embrace the random. Fittingly, being idle is perhaps the only sure way to enhance your perception of weak signals, thereby increasing your odds of finding serendipity like Janek Schaefer.

ENDS

Andrew Smart is the author of Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing, which explores the psychological and neural benefits of idleness. The book makes a serious neuroscientific argument that our wage-slave society and busyness obsession cause brain damage. Andrew has degrees in cognitive science from Lund University in Sweden. He is currently working on a new book about machine consciousness and LSD. Andrew works in the area of human-computer interaction research and human factors.