#23: An Eagle in Your Mind

This week: Down the rabbit hole of Sleep Sounds, AI-adaptive soundtracks, noise-masking and Sleep Buds // Things to read, watch and do this week // Plus, WAC Weekly and a rare Twins of Canada mix

This week is a special deep-dive into all things sleep. Sleep sounds, sleep headphones, and what a sleep app’s adaptive soundtracks might tell us about the future of music.

There’s just one more “Creative R&D” to come before I take a few weeks break.

After a very hectic year it’s nearly time to take a holiday.

Let’s get going.

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ART! // Sleep no more

I am not a good sleeper, and never have been.

Tween goth existentialist, contemplating DOOM whilst gorging on Massive Attack and Aphex Twin … No sleep.

Too many nightclubs and bad habits from late teens through my 20s…. No sleep.

Then kids. Gah. Another decade, still no sleep.

Now the onset of middle age and all those gripes. Still no sleep.

So the whole Sleep-tech Wellness industry that’s sprung up over the last decade leaves me both cold and, let’s be honest, madly jealous.

DAMN YOU and your well disciplined brainwaves.

But…

Middle-aged man in a world of sleep sounds

But.

The content vein that’s been opened around sleep is interesting, and like Erosion Birds and Musical Shit-Post Modernism, Dragon Slayer Anime and Sludge Posts, they’re another form of emergent 21st century digital aesthetics I think we need to treat with more seriousness.

Go to YouTube or Spotify and search for “sleep” and you’ve entered another of the internet’s rabbit holes.

10 hour mixes of forest sounds or pink noise claiming recorded in binaural audio at 6 HZ - which may be “good” for the brain.

On Spotify, endless playlists. Lapping ocean waves. Oscillating fans.

On the little Google speaker we use as an alarm clock the sounds have no source - they’re just baked in, one of those rare moments where Google themselves become content creator.

Ask for “Forest Country Sounds" and I think you’re getting no more than an eternal 8 bar loop of crickets, frogs and wind in the trees.

There’s lots of interesting elements to all this.

One there’s the popularity. This content vein is reaching volume. Hundreds of YouTube videos in the 10s of millions, even more Spotify streams in the hundreds of millions.

Then there’s the anonymity of the makers. This great Guardian piece from a couple of years ago talks about the brewing but invisible industry, where only a very few production studios like Lullify are out in public.

There’s the alignment of course with the mechanics of search engines. All of these content wells are ultimately reactive to what people go searching for.

And let’s ignore the hokey-Instagram Wellness science, which uses tiny cohort research, funded by exactly the companies promoting it in the first place to suggest neurological benefits we can barely understand.

But where I think this is creatively meaningful is where it points towards a new form of musical practise which artists are starting to play with, and which I think could become something genuinely meaningful in the decade ahead.

Back in Issue 11 I talked about the Humane.AI Pin and talked about how these new post-screen devices could unlock a real-time, adaptive soundtrack to your life, generative AI adapting existing music according to a whole range of data-inputs.

The R&D into adaptive experiences is a driver for significant investments into neuro-tech, where companies like ArcTop are raising major venture capital dollars to:

make personalized, unprecedented experiences possible by enabling responsiveness to real-time feedback directly from the brain.

There will be a lot to come in the decade ahead.

But in this Sleep and Wellness black hole, the first proper attempts towards it are already happening.

Endel was released way back in 2020, and comes loaded with promise of the benefits of adaptive soundtracks to real-life:

Our patented technology creates soundscapes that adapt in real-time. It reacts to inputs like time of day, weather, heart rate, and location. Neuroscience shows Endel consistently improves focus and lowers stress

I’ve used Endel for trips to the gym, and it’s … ok.

An endless mix of ambient swooshes, soft house and techno beats, with some pretty nice bass, it changes as you speed up or slow down, mixing in and out different elements … you get some genuinely good moments where a beat drops just as you hit a peak on the bike. Some nice highs and mellow lows.

It all utterly lacks character - the power of any music is in the particular sound world of its creators, that magical bit at the intersection between all the technologies in the room and the creative brilliance of the musicians, singers and producers who made it.

That lack of character diminishes its utility pretty rapidly.

20 minutes on the bike was fine.

Another 20 on the treadmill and I was bored.

I’d switched it off before we got near the weights room.

That lack of character, and the need to drive visibility, will be the motive for their partnerships with artists.

And this is where I think there’s something important to come.

So far Endel have worked with the brilliant James Blake and the used-to-be-brilliant Grimes. And late last year they signed a deal with Universal to create adaptive experiences with both new artists and catalogue.

I find the James Blake piece particularly disappointing.

He’s got such a particular vibe - that haunted white soul voice, skeleton beats, drone bass and floating keyboards. When he’s good on a song like Retrograde, he’s phenomenal.

But there’s very little of that in the Endel piece - it’s just another ambient soundscape. It doesn’t feel like him.

I don’t know if that’s a constraint of an early-stage technology or just a creative dud.

But I think this is a place where great new music will emerge, breaking down the compositional boundaries of the song or the symphony into something alive to its physical and virtual environments.

My guess is for that to happen we need to remove all this bullsh*t marketing baggage about Focus, Calm and Sleep.

Stop telling us this is science. It makes it sound like a broccoli smoothie.

Remember that this is art. It’s exciting, dangerous and may be bad for you.

Allow chance and randomness as well as data-directed design.

Loosen it up and let artists loose directly at the interface with the algorithms and we’ll get somewhere new that may define what we mean by “music” for the century ahead.

Remember the lesson of Alice in Wonderland, it’s when you escape from the rabbit hole that the most magical new world’s appear.

Keep listening.

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Your must-do in Web 3 // WAC Weekly

I’m totally delighted to have WAC Weekly as newsletter partners.

WAC Weekly is THE best place to keep up with what’s going on as Web 3 meets the Art ecosystem. A weekly call every Wednesday at 6 CET, it has an amazing revolving cast of speakers and projects.

It’s run by old friend and major maven, Diane Drubay. Register now - this season has a couple more months to run.

And look out for some exclusive content I’m making for Diane and WAC Labs over the coming weeks.

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IDEAS! // What to do, read and see in Creative R&D

Looking for the best in digital creativity this week? Check out what’s going on below:

• Sport keeps creeping into this newsletter with its artistic and cultural bent. Sorry (not sorry). But this piece on Arsenal captain Martin Odegaard using sped-up virtual reality simulations of football matches to help him think faster in real match scenarios is brilliant. It also comes back to my idea that the value of immersive might come more from how we stretch our ideas of time and space rather than replicating the time-space continuum we happen to live in.

• A piece of weird nostalgia. This video from 20 years ago of a fashion show with models porting “gadgets from the future” is a hoot. Kind of half-right - the categories of device, VR and AR headsets, smart glasses, portable video-phones all came to be, but the aesthetics are all wrong. Clunky, bulky and frankly, ugly - a reminder than pre-Jonny Ive, digital device design was basically nasty. Also a reminder that Fashion.TV was and is very odd.

• The doomer-ism over AI grows at a pace of one major article per week. This is another hot take, whose idea is that AI kills the internet - there’s a kind of explicit breakpoint where the only value left can be in data-scraped before AI’s mass introduction in mid-2023, after which, the rapid scale-up of crap means anything left is not to be trusted.

• In London over the next month? Go to GLOW. Professor Sarah Atkinson from King’s College London is an old friend from National Gallery X days, and this season about the role of women in immersive technology is full of excellence.

  

  GLOW’s Spotlight on VR - showcasing the role of female creators in immersive

• The British Library’s cyber-hack was the biggest takedown of a cultural institution we’ve seen. Their reflections on the process are excellently thoughtful, and should be required reading for anyone preserving meaningful cultural data, anywhere.

• I’m agnostic on Apple (and Meta’s) plays for spatial computing, a story I told back in issue 15. It looks and feels more like a play to keep a customer data / apps ecosystem together that’s straining at the edges rather than delivering real user need. But this way of watching basketball (sports, again, bah!!) from Exar.Live is pretty cool.

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TECHNOLOGY! // The Other Side of Sleep

In a week where we’ve dived into the content rabbit hole of sleep sounds, it would be remiss not to look at the same human urge to sleep from a consumer devices perspective.

Because if there’s a lot of money being made from sounds of waves crashing on the beach, there’s equally lots of tech R&D going into making the perfect set of night-time headphones that help solve the human riddle of a good nights sleep.

Back in 2018 Bose released the Sleepbuds, a tiny in-ear headphone that had only one purpose, to:

deliver relaxing and noise-masking sounds to help fall asleep and stay asleep all night.

No podcasts. No songs. Just original content from the Bose Sleep app. As an attempt at vertical integration between content and technology it was … odd.

They didn’t work.

But they’ve left a scaling market behind in which lots of devices keep pouring out.

You can go headband-based like the SleepPhone or Snoozeband.

Or earbud based like the original Bose’s from Quieton.

Or wraparound wire like Philips’.

Whichever you choose it’s a spillover application of a core technology called noise-masking - a category distinct from the noise-cancelling you use in your daytime earbuds or headphones.

Noise masking or sound masking has its origins in office architectural design, where certain sound frequencies might be played through speakers to reduce the travel of sound between different office spaces.

Miniaturisation means the tiny speakers we now put in our ears become the focus, trying to zone out snoring or tinnitus.

But with all this focus on the physical and external sound world, can they stop the sounds inside our heads?

That’s the question.

I don’t find it hard to get to sleep. Honestly, let me nap and I’m gone in a second.

It’s staying asleep that’s the problem, and the multi-sensory environment of dreams which often seem to cause me to wake-up.

I hope these devices help people.

But they’re only addressing a part of the problem.

And there seems more we don’t know about the causes and problems of sleep than what we do, and so devices like this can only be a very fragmentary solution.

It seems no mistake to me that Bose, who opened this category, have exited it and not returned.

So for now, keep napping.

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And finally… Twins of Canada

Last week’s dubstep tribute definitely raised a few smiles, comments and emails amongst a certain cohort of readers…

It’s good to know you’re out there fellow travellers.

This week’s musical find is inspired by the theme of sleep - this awesome mix of two electronica greats, Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, who both played on sleep, dream states and a certain nap-like wooziness. This interview about Aphex’s attempts to avoid sleep is a great read.

Solely made up of obscurities, the mix is from November 23 and HELLA GOOD.

I go up and down with Aphex Twin. I can’t think of another artist who’s been so good, and often so annoying.

Sometimes in the same song.

But he’s responsible for one of my favourite clubbing moments ever, so I’ll forgive him anything.

Sometime in the very late 90s he ran a short-lived night with fellow glitch weirdo Squarepusher at (I think) Heaven 2, just off the back of Charing Cross Road. Walking (realistically staggering, possibly crawling, they were Hunter S. Thompson-ish days) in with a friend, we were barged out of the way by some very large security guards around a small blonde woman.

None other than Madonna was on her way out.

Getting inside, it was probably clear why.

The mix was MADNESS - 200bpm Dutch Gabba with Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get it On played out of tune and out of time over the top.

I guess this was about the time when her Mad-jesty was reinventing herself again through dance music. An R&D mission looking for a producer partner for the follow up to Ray of Light?

William Orbit this was not. ABANDON SHIP.

Fun times.

And of course for the eagle-eyed, you’ll know this week’s title is a track from the outstanding 1998 debut by Boards of Canada, Music Has the Right to Children. Still on the playlist 25 years on.

Have a good week.