Leonard Cohen : "Suzanne" - Montréal Jazz Festival (2008)

The Hallelujah effect is about the working of “entrainment,” ‘effected’ as it is and most efficiently so by sound: one’s brain, so to speak, rather more literally than one thinks, aligns itself with certain wavelengths, heard and unheard (the sonic including both subsonic, as Goodman points out, and the supersonic), which last “unheard” can also  be same as saying what is in effect “heard” as Sharon Weinberger writes “only by you.” Weinberger's reference to this phenomenon has military applications and these in turn bleed over into popular culture, as Steve Goodman has explored this from a number of perspectives studying both the military uses of sound as well as the military influences on club and pop music. 

As all of us are well aware, beyond club music culture and apart from the military, everyday television shows employ distinctive opening sound sequences and certain commercial jingles are associated with certain brands.

This is your brain on drugs.

Like drugs, the joke in question can be varied: this is your brain on line: on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter.

 Consider the sing song AOL ping reminder, itself the eponymous title of the 1998 Hollywood film You’ve Got Mail.  

The movie itself offered a popular cultural riff on the erotic subversion that drove the AOL experience.

But the study of the connection between the larger phenomenon (and the even larger profit margin) of internet pornography, underscoring the internet as source for our absorptions has yet to be exhausted.

The very point of media is mediation, that is connection as the journalist Vance Packard and the communications scholar Marshall McLuhan both observed themselves drawing upon a phenomenon already adumbrated (and to be sure inaugurated) by Edward Bernays. 

Both the sexual and the social drive or ‘effect’ priming, programming, branding. This is how advertisement works and, to argue contra a popular internet meme, the internet is not so much full of cats as it is full of, suffused with, percolated through and through by ads, ads interrupted by further ads, ads everywhere, all the way down, and all the way up. 

Where ads once crawled across the page (drawing the user to track them and thus fixate upon them to click them away), today studies of eye movements are used to determine placement such that we are often unaware of the bill-boardification, as it were, of the webpage as indeed our email inboxes, spam filter and all).   

Part the First or I. Prelude to the Effect: Sonic Branding

The Hallelujah Effect studies the ‘effect’ of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah beyond its effect on radio or television as this is simultaneously echoed on YouTube, which last is itself a media version of the eternal return of the same in potentia (i.e., depending [and of course this is meant as a joke...] on the number +1 of relevant hits), an echoing effect related to the resonant frequency that is a pop music ‘hit’ or a viral video and so on. 

Some commentators echoing the scholarly analysis of mimesis speak of “memes” but the term (like the remix recoil of what the electronic remix artist Kode9 aka Steve Goodmancalls “memetic” music) emphasizes not only repetition but also evanescence, poised to suppose such things no more than passing fads, like a mental hula hoop, here today, gone tomorrow. Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Game of Thrones, any latest thing.

I have argued that the ‘effect’ of Cohen’s song in and through its many covers works the way advertising works, that is by way of what psychologists (and marketing consultants) call ‘priming’ and marketers name ‘branding,’ whereby the covert is the key. Priming or branding works because we do not notice it.

Hence our thoughts are  ‘entrained’, (more rather than less literally speaking), whereby, as the Yale cognitive scientist, the psychologist John Bargh argues (in a convergent argument with Nietzsche’s critique of causality), we suppose per contra that our will is free.

See John Bargh & Brian D. Earp’s “The Will is Caused, Not Free.” Nietzsche argues a similar point contra free will, but to the extent that Nietzsche’s argument is offered in the epistemological context of his critique of causality, the parallel is obviously limited.

See on Nietzsche and causality as such my discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of causality in "Nietzsche's 'Gay Science'" as well as my discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of causality in "Nietzsche's 'Gay Science'" and a recent essay (here) on Nietzsches critical philosophy of science as well as forthcoming essay "Nietzsche and Hume" based on a talk I gave at the University of Vienna as part of the 2012-2012 series in philosophy of science.  

I recommend as well, for an analytic-friendly discussion, Justin Remhof’s "Naturalism, Causality, and Constructivism in Nietzsche's Conception of Science."

Der Dogmatiker

The Hallelujah Effect: Archaeology of a Harmony in Three Parts

What is the technology of sound? What is the technology of the technical reproducibility of sound?  

Writing after Heidegger’s questioning of The Origin of the Work of Art, and at the conclusion of a list of a variety of technological means of reproducibility in the various spheres of art, Walter Benjamin reports smoothly (which is just how we scholars like it) that the 

“the technical  production of sound was tackled at the end of the last century.”

Indeed, “the technical reproduction” of sound had been “seemingly tackled” even earlier by other inventors in France but by the last third of the 19th century, as illustrated by Edison’s publication of an account of his invention of the phonograph just before year’s end in Scientific American in 1877 it would seem to have been securely tacked down.  

But Benjamin is quite precise, to the year itself (given the 1900 intervention of Emil Berliner’s patented master’s voice), such that in the decades to follow, recordings were in full productive swing.

Theodor  Adorno adds complexity  (which is not how we like it), raising as he does the phenomenological question of the techno-mechanical transmission of music in his The Current of Music and (with yet more complexity), going back to the Nietzsche of the 1870’s and indeed to 770 BC with the earliest system for the technical reproduction of sound (i.e., the Greek invention of “truly phonetic writing” as Ivan Illich argues), there is the spirit of music at the heart of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.  

In Ivan Illich’s paean to this technology, the first “truly phonetic writing was a one-time invention, made in Greece around 770 BC.”  (In the Vineyard of the Text) With beautiful concision, Illich describes this “one time invention” as characterized by “the use of signs for both consonants (which are obstacles to breath) and for vowels (which indicate the color given to the column of air that is spirited out of the lungs).”  

It is in order to raise the question of the technical reproducibility of sound, that we begin in the present day: with YouTube and other media, turning then to radio and the current of music in the era of the second World War, and finally exploring the implications of reading as Nietzsche does (and Ivan Illich only accords with Nietzsche’s reading of), ancient Greek as a technology for reproducing sound: the spirit of music.

From the postprint 
“The Hallelujah Effect: Archaeology of a Harmony in Three Parts.”