Artifacts

by Greg Egan

  Underwood nodded again, still unhappy, but deferring to the expert.

  “Now, having created a well-defined mathematical model of the generic listener, we’re able to determine its response to any pattern of input. Any sequence of sounds. Any piece of music. Do you see?”

  “Yes, but if all it does is what every listener does, what’s the use of it? You could as easily listen to the sounds yourself, and see how you react.”

  Halbright shook his head and said, patiently, “Two things. Firstly, it’s free of the complications of individual taste. Experimenting on the computer model is a bit like experimenting on the two thousand plus volunteers upon whom it was based, and then looking at the average response of that entire group—only it’s a lot quicker, easier, and cheaper. Secondly, because the model is so precisely defined, we needn’t just play it tunes at random and see what the effects are. We can use various mathematical techniques to work backwards, to design music specifically to affect the model in a chosen way.”

  Underwood frowned. “The first application, I can understand. If we wanted to test a melody for a jingle, we could play it to the computer, and if the computer liked it, you claim everyone in the world would like it, too.

  “Hold on! No. We don’t claim that at all. The model doesn’t ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ anything. Even if we could characterize those responses, how could it? All of its properties are shared by people with wildly different, perhaps even mutually exclusive, musical tastes. But what the model can do is remember music. We haven’t limited it to the structures responsible for real-time auditory processing; all the machinery of short-term and long-term auditory memory is included. So if a melody elicits a strong, persistent response in the model, then we can predict that in a real listener, the same thing will happen: the music will be memorable. We’ve tested this out in a dozen experiments, and there’s no doubt at all that it holds true.

  “And what about this music you’ve had the computer create? What’s the use of that? You say the computer has no opinion of it either way; what do people think?”

  Halbright grinned. “Some people love it. Some people despise it. But, like it or loathe it, they can’t get it out of their heads. After a single hearing, we have a one hundred percent success rate for subjects recalling our optimized melodies, long after they’ve forgotten control tunes.”

  Underwood laughed. “This is beginning to remind me of The Old Grey Whistle Test.”

  “The what?”

  “The Old Grey Whistle Test!”

  Halbright shook his head, perplexed. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Certain record companies in the sixties—so the story goes—used to decide whether or not to release a song by roping in the building’s janitor—usually an old man—and making him listen to it. If even this old fuddy-duddy, who presumably hated rock and roll, could whistle the melody after hearing it once, the song was worth putting on disk. If not, forget it. Hence ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test.’ There was even a rock music show on British TV named after it.”

  Halbright was annoyed by the frivolous comparison, but hid his reaction as well as he could. Underwood was the first advertising executive who’d actually agreed to talk to him, and if the man wanted to tell any number of pointless anecdotes about the 1960s, he’d sit through them all with a smile on his face.

  “The important thing,” he said earnestly, “is that we’ve eliminated the need for that kind of trial and error. We’ve gone beyond mere testing. It’s like … He struggled to think of a dignified metaphor. “Pharmacology used to be all luck, or at best educated guesswork: they’d test a few thousand likely substances on animal models, and see which of them, if any, did the trick. Today, people sit down with computers and design the molecule that’s best for the job. Well, that’s what we’ve done for music.”

  Underwood nodded. “I think I understand what you’re getting at—but what I’d really like is to hear some of the results.”

  Halbright insisted that he sign a twenty-page nondisclosure agreement, before letting him listen to a sample tune. “None of this music has been published in any form, so we have to be extremely careful to protect our rights.”

  Despite all the build-up, Underwood was not expecting much, so he was neither surprised nor disappointed by the inane little melody in four-four time that Halbright’s console finally played for them. The timbre was authentic grand piano—as fine an instrument as ever was sampled and sold on a fifteen-cent ROM—but that only made the music’s utter banality all the more painfully obvious.

  Underwood made some noncommittal remarks, then finally escaped from the office by pleading a pressing appointment, and promising to consult with his colleagues and get in touch again as soon as possible. Halbright was unfazed by this euphemistic brush-off, and seemed as happy and confident when the two men parted as he had been when they met.

  As he walked through the dazzling sunshine across Bentley Technology Park’s lavishly reticulated lawns, Underwood caught himself whistling the tune, and angrily stopped. The piece was ranked one-hundred-and-eightieth, out of the two hundred that ANM had generated so far, but he had to admit that it stuck in his mind as tenaciously as any other scrap of bubble-gum music he had come across—and in his line of work, there had been many. Somehow, though, it was more offensive than most: appallingly simple, insultingly bland, music unfit for a nursery rhyme, lacking a single redeeming charm. He had no doubt that any composer who had stumbled upon it in the past would have taken a stiff drink and gone to bed, in the hope of waking up with this aberration mercifully forgotten.

  As he drove north into the city, traffic noise—which usually drove him mad—could not even begin to compete with his memory of the tune, and as he ascended to the thirtieth-storey offices of The Inspiration Factory, the horrendous pap in the elevator—a synthetic orchestral version of the Sex Pistols’s “Anarchy in the UK”—was barely noticeable.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon, and much of the evening, selecting music for the Hypersoft commercial. This meant J. S. Bach—the clients had insisted—and since most of the best-known works had already been used within recent memory, he had to search the music library for several hours before he found an unexploited passage with just the right mood for an up-market toilet paper.

  Bach, he was pleased to note, soon drove Halbright’s obnoxious musical parasite right out of his head.

  By the time he had located four alternatives, it was after ten o’clock. With one keystroke, he sent a memo listing his suggestions to all the people working on the Hypersoft campaign, then he switched off his console with a weary sigh, and headed home.

  Magda was in bed, but not asleep. Underwood hit a selection on the freezer/microwave on his way past, then walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed beside her.

  “Hi.”

  She frowned. “You look sick.”

  He laughed. “And how was your day?”

  “I’ve nearly finished.”

  “See? I told you sound tracks weren’t so hard.”

  “The director still has to hear it. She might hate it.”

  “Crap. You talked it all over with her months ago. She’s heard all the individual themes.”

  “I’ve added some new ones.”

  “She’ll love it. All of it.” He kissed her, then the microwave beeped.

  After eating and showering, he climbed into bed. Magda had fallen asleep. He slipped on a pair of infrared headphones, touched a few keys on the bed’s entertainment unit, then lay back and waited for the music to begin.

  Most of his favorite classical works had long since been lost to him—ruined by the kind of association it was his job to forge—but his tastes were eclectic, and there were gems, as yet intact, to be found elsewhere.

  This Mortal Coil’s “Song of the Siren” flowed into his skull like liquid silver, banishing the room, banishing his body, banishing all of the day’s indignities. He seemed to float in vibrant darkness, disembodied, his soul resonating with
every note, the singer’s unbearably sweet voice engulfing him in cool, translucent, purifying flames.

  This nightly ritual meant far more to him than the pleasure of the music itself. He craved reassurance that, however much his job required him to treat music as just one more tool of marketing psychology, a part of him was still able to value it for its own sake. A part of him could still be moved.

  When the song ended, he lay in the dark, listening to Magda’s slow breathing, thinking: Bach for toilet paper. Beethoven for insurance. Mozart for ice cream. It was obscene, and there was no point pretending that it wasn’t. He had heard the standard argument many times, he had used it himself in his own defense: All the great composers had sold themselves, had written for the sake of money and position and prestige, none had been ascetics or saints—but ultimately, he believed, this justified nothing. However venal the composer might have been, something was lost from people’s enjoyment of the work itself when it became inextricably linked in their minds with some consumer product, or company name. And yes, a TV commercial might bring a thirty-second version of a masterpiece to millions of people who might otherwise have never heard it at all—but seeing that as worthwhile struck Underwood as patronizing in the extreme. If most people chose not to seek out classical music, that was their right; the claim that advertising was magnanimously “bringing culture to the masses” would have been ludicrous and offensive, even if it were more than a cynical post facto excuse.

  An idea that had been growing in the back of his mind all afternoon suddenly leapt into focus: perhaps John Halbright’s revolting little tunes were the answer. Sure, they were unspeakably awful, but what did that matter? Composers had been cranking out vile, but catchy, music for the advertising industry for decades; if taking that to its logical conclusion could halt the current fashion for looting the classics, it could only be a good thing. Sure, it meant polluting people’s minds with musical effluent, tailored to be remembered however much it was disliked—but that was nothing new, and it had to be better than eventually devaluing every great work of the last three centuries.

  Underwood fell asleep with ANM tune #180 running through his head, but in spite of that he felt happier than he had in years. At last, he thought, he was going to do his job the way it should have been done from the start; at last, his clients were going to get the music they deserved.

  As Magda dressed, she whistled tune #180. Underwood stared at her. “Where did you hear that?”

  She stopped and frowned, puzzled. “I don’t know. Hang on … you were whistling it last night, weren’t you? In the shower, while I was drifting off to sleep?”

  He couldn’t remember doing so, but obviously he had. “Well, try to forget it, will you? I signed a sheaf of paper which said I’d burn in hell if I repeated it to anyone.”

  She whistled a few more bars, listening critically for the first time, then grimaced with distaste. “I’m not surprised. If I’d written it, I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear it either. My lips are sealed, I promise.”

  Ten minutes later, she was doing it again.

  Driving into town, Underwood began to have second thoughts. It had reached the stage where the tune was playing over and over in his skull, without the briefest respite—how could he wish the same fate upon hundreds of thousands of people?—but he told himself it was the context, not the music itself, that was responsible. He had high hopes for ANM’s product, so it was only reasonable that he be preoccupied with the one example that he’d heard so far.

  After driving straight through a red light and almost being wiped out by a petrol tanker, he pulled up at the side of the road, shaken. He could hardly put the blame for his brush with death on Halbright’s music; it was his own state of indecision that had distracted him. The thing to do was to bury his qualms and strengthen his resolve. Noble aspirations about saving the classics from further rape seemed secondary now; if he didn’t make a deal with Halbright, someone else would. Someone else would capture all the lucrative accounts which the ANM tunes, if skillfully deployed, would eventually attract; he owed it to the company to get involved, or the competition would bury them. One way or another, the tunes would all end up being heard by the public; what better way to make sure that this breakthrough was used responsibly, than to involve himself with it as closely as he could?

  He squeezed his way back into the traffic.

  As Underwood had anticipated, even after he’d convinced The Inspiration Factory’s partners that he’d found a potential gold mine, everything progressed at a snail’s pace. It took several months of negotiations just to arrange a contract with Applied Neural Mapping which would allow certain of the agency staff to listen to a few of the available tunes, and play them to selected clients for approval. Ideally, Halbright explained, the melodies should be used in order of increasing potency, with long intervals between release. “There’s a masking effect; if we used the best tunes first, we’d be making people less receptive to the others.”

  The first campaign to use an ANM tune was for a local soft drink manufacturer, Millworth and Hobbs, who were struggling to compete with the international giants and their megabuck celebrity endorsements. Tune #164 was arranged for two fiddles, harmonica, and drum machine, and decorated with numerous riffs which went a small way towards disguising its naked awfulness. A singer who could reproduce the media’s idea of the state’s typical rural accent was found, and he heartily sang:

  There’s only one drink

  Made here in the sun:

  Millworth and Hobbs!

  There’s only one drink

  For our own brand of fun:

  Millworth and Hobbs!

  They’re the drinks that sparkle with sunshine!

  One sip and you’ll never look back!

  It’s the drink for the family

  The old and the young:

  Millworth and Hobbs!

  The campaign began with radio, predominantly the city’s top-rated FM rock station. The results were phenomenal. Preliminary phone polls showed an unprecedented rise in the level of product awareness, and within weeks this could be seen translated into sales, which increased by an astonishing fifty-three percent in little more than a month. The company—which had been contemplating retrenchments—had to introduce a night shift to keep up with demand. The TV phase was shelved; it would have been money down the drain, when a new plant would have to be built before production could rise any further.

  The clients were over the moon. Underwood was given a substantial raise. ANM were paid a bonus, stipulated in the contract for any tune which boosted sales by more than twenty-five percent.

  Underwood heard people whistling #164 everywhere—at work, in the streets, in shops—but he knew he was biased, he knew he would notice it more readily than any other tunes he might hear. Magda whistled it, unconsciously, and he gave up telling her when she was doing it. He whistled it himself, and fell asleep at night hearing it; listening to other music drove it away, but in silence it soon came back—sometimes alone, but usually dragging the obnoxious lyrics with it. It astonished him that people weren’t smashing bottles of Millworth and Hobbs in protest, weren’t storming the soft drink company—or its advertising agency—weren’t calling for someone’s head. But they weren’t. There was no public outcry. People were used to having music they hated pumped into their brains, and however radical and effective Halbright’s method of composition, his music belonged to an established, and accepted, tradition.

  The campaign’s remarkable success was noted, briefly, in the local press, and commented on extensively in the advertising trade magazines, but the deal with ANM remained a secret. Underwood doubted that this would last forever, and felt sure that once all the details were out, some sections of the media would label the whole affair as “brainwashing,” but the fact remained that they’d simply done well what everyone in the business had been doing for years.

  Other campaigns soon followed. There was no need to encourage clients to give up t
he classics for the ANM style; they had seen the effect on Millworth and Hobbs, and demanded to be let onto the bandwagon. Underwood would have been more than just disappointed if the trend had not caught on; he would have been unable to do his job. The ANM tunes had virtually commandeered his musical sensibilities; he could still listen to other music, but he had trouble recalling even the most memorable works unaided (had anyone asked him to whistle a few bars from “The Hall of the Mountain King” or “The Ride of the Valkyries,” he would not have been able to oblige), and the task of selecting an appropriate classical piece for a given commercial would have taken him ten times as long as it once had.

  This affliction, he told himself, could not last. Clearly, other people were not affected as badly as he was. Magda had been commissioned to compose the sound track for a mini-series, and she went ahead and did the job with no apparent difficulty; Underwood could not have composed anything if his life had depended on it.

  As more and more potent tunes were released, he grew much worse—yet he couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone that he felt like he was being buried under layer after layer of musical excrement. After lapses of concentration led to a few near misses in his car, he started taking the bus to work. The possibility that other people might be risking their lives horrified him, but he dismissed it as ludicrous. Everyone he saw around him seemed to be functioning normally, which proved that he was a special case—and wasn’t that to be expected, when he was exposed to the tunes more frequently than almost anyone else? In fact, there had been a rise in traffic accidents in the past few months—stories were run in the press and on TV, politicians and police made their usual calls for various countermeasures—but this was hardly the first time there’d been a statistical fluctuation in the road toll.