A virus that infected all music

G Hi Everybody, your one and only Greg Zeroin is here again. Today, I will bring you a story that will hit you like a ton of bricks. A scientist sits in my studio right now. We cannot even reveal the real name or the affiliation of my guest, right? So let us call him Dr. Stratton, okay?

S I certainly appreciate the confidentiality right now.

G So, Dr. Stratton could you tell us a couple of words about the problem you and your team were working on when that incident happened.

S Gladly. How do I begin? Me and my team, we’re neuroscientists and software engineers working on understanding and perhaps modifying the workings of the human mind. To make it a little more efficient. More flexible, more resilient and more intelligent. Our main interest is something that we call “deep neural processing”.

G Dr. Stratton, you need to educate us on these matters.

S Yes, yes. You know the human mind is a very complex system and under the right kind of circumstances it can be attentive of something in a rather superfluous way on the surface, while, at the same time it can be busy with something rather devotedly. And under these special circumstances we could say, just having fun, relax or engage in some careless and effortless activity, such as partying or listening to say, popular music and we may not even be aware that in the depth of our minds we’re in serious business, dealing with serious problems, learning new skills or taking in complex information about something.

G This already sounds rather science-fiction to me. Are you telling us that we can learn quantum mechanics while sipping cocktails by the pool? Solving math problems while dancing and fooling around with our friends all day?

S Well, hehe, something like that, yes. Now, you have to understand that our research is not yet in the implementation phase, we are looking at good examples and settings in which we can study these circumstances and understand how to bring them about.

G So what is a good example by which you study this phenomenon?

S Well, we have tried many scenarios without much success. Everyone on my team love music, and most of us play instruments as well. So, one day, as we were fuming about popular music...

G You don’t like pop music?

S Well, we don’t and that’s to put it mildly. Look, we have classical music, jazz, progressive rock and a bunch of other immensely interesting styles and an endless stream of goodness. A whole universe of first class creative and imaginative works. Yet, contemporary composers of this type are struggling to get noticed. At the same time auto tuned clowns imitate singing over some canned beat using the same four chord progressions and THAT sucks up nearly all the bandwidth on streaming services and also in the minds of young people. You know, I think we deserve more.

G People will listen to whatever feels okay to them. Do you see that as a problem?

S Well no… and yes. You see, in the last decade, when streaming services took over music distribution, we thought it was going to get better as people will have access to a much larger pool of music to choose from. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Profit hungry algorithms took over the job of people discussing and recommending things. A pyramid scheme of the worst kind took over music distribution. Anyway, long story short, things got worse, and with my team, we regularly discussed these matters and at some point, we started actively thinking about maybe doing something about it.

G To do something about… what exactly?

S It was just an idea at first. What if we could get people to listen to one kind of music on the surface and another music in the depths of their mind at the same time?

G Listening to two music at the same time?

S Yes, but the person would be aware of only one of them. Because the other music is superimposed on the soundwaves of the one that gets into their awareness. You know, music is basically frequencies, intensities and complexities. And we can relatively easily pack all that across and beyond the audible spectrum. That’s the easy part. The trick is to embed the hidden music in such a way that it will trigger deep neural processing reliably. If done the right way, then the person will think that they are listening to Justin Bieber or Ed Seheran…

G Sheeran.

S That’s right, my apologies. So, folks will experience, for all they can say, these pop tunes but in their minds are all busy with taking in Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Coltrain or Braxton. And in a way that will enrich their connection to music in meaningful ways to the degree that eventually they will start looking actively for something like that, when they select what to listen to.

G Wow. It's like a kind of secret involuntary ear sharpening music education. But... is such a thing even possible?

S Yes, it is. Our initial results were very promising. For the people we tested it worked as expected. But as I said, we were in the early stages of development and we needed to run tests on as many people as we could. And then the covid pandemic hit the world and we quickly ran out of participants. We were way too excited about this project, we were so desperate to move on. So… we figured we could use a playlist on one of the major streaming services. Just one playlist that we loaded with some of these prepared tracks. We wanted to reach people from afar, so they don’t have to come to our laboratories. They can listen to that playlist from the comfort of their own home and we sent them a little device, a wearable measurement tool that would monitor their deep neural processing.

G This all sounds very interesting. But it is difficult not to notice some resentment in your voice. What happened?

 

S Well, we're still trying to get a hold on the situation. A young engineer in our team got a little too ambitious. She... ehrm..wanted to save some time and she wrote a computer macro in order to prepare all the songs in the playlist automatically. Let me get this straight. So, there’s the playlist with all these stupid pop songs.

G Excuse me?

S Apologies, this is just how we call them in the lab. For deep neural processing, she selected a piece of music. Just a piece that she wanted to use in the first round of remote experiments.

G What was that piece?

S Well it has no significance now, but okay, it was a piece from an obscure Hungarian composer, Palatinus. Huginn and Muninn was the title. You know, these are the names of those ravens in Norse mythology. These birds, you know, they serve Odin as eyes and ears and they can get everywhere in the world in one day… Anyway, instead of superimposing this piece of music onto every pop song on the playlist one by one, she wrote a macro that did it for her. You know, automatically.

G Okay?

S However, she forgot to make sure that the macro stops when it’s done with all the songs. As the first person started streaming from our playlist the macro got out to their other playlists and by the end of the day it infected all servers. To make it worse, the next day we detected the superimposed piece on other services too.

G Are you saying that…

S Yes.

G Every service? How many songs got superimposed with Huginn and Muninn?

S Well it is hard to say it for sure, you know, but it is safe to say that practically all of them.

G All songs?

S All songs on every major streaming service.

G Sweet. Jesus. So, while it was there, embedded, no matter what song people were listening to, they were deep-neural-processing this piece of music from this guy they never even heard of?

S Correct. 

G So how long has this craziness lasted? And how did you get it off, I mean I assume you got it off somehow, right?

S Well... to tell you the truth…we... ehrm..

G Dr. Stratton, please don’t tell me that it’s still there. Please don’t tell me that… as a result of your godforsaken involuntary music education experiment, from now on anyone who tries to listen to anything on any service will deep-process Huginn and Muninn until the end of times!

S No, we did something to remedy the situation.

G My goodness, what did you do to remedy the situation?

S We could not get the modification off just like that. It got into the data structure of the songs too deeply. What we could do was masking its effect by superimposing something else instead. And, to be honest, by that time we were worried about the moral issues involved in all this involuntary music education thing too. Finally, we had the rebuilt macro to assign songs randomly to one another.

G Wha.. what do you mean? There’s no Huginn and Muninn embedded anymore to be deeply processed but is there something instead? A random song?

S Yes.

G Wait, so, right now, if I open Spotify or Deezer, or Tidal and listen to a song I will deep process some other song in the back of my mind?

S I am afraid, yes you will.

G And God only knows what music will be deep processed? ZZ Top, Ella Fitzgerald or Rudolf the red nose reindeer? Or Huginn and Muninn? Or even the exact song that I wanted to play?

S Well, there will be something embedded. And yes, there’s a non-zero chance that it will be any one of the songs you just mentioned. Except for the last one. The macro will not allow for a song to be embedded onto itself. Obviously, that was our first idea to solve the problem but a lot of people get severe headaches from that. It has to be something else.

G I am speechless. Dr Stratton, do you understand how embarrassing this little game of yours turned out for all of us? You had a rather questionable research idea and it got out of hand way before we had a chance to approve anything about it, and things just went downhill from there...

S Yes, Greg, I do understand the situation and I take full responsibility for everything that happened. I assure you that we have not finished with trying to return to how things were before. But while we’re at it, couldn’t you just relax and enjoy the certainty of getting exposed to a whole new range of music in a deep, meaningful way. I know, the unexpected happened but there’s a chance that it still has some beneficial effects on the population.

G Dr. Stratton, please tell me something. Are you sure that your marco, or shall I call it virus, assigns songs to be embedded in a truly random fashion? Or did you build in some kind of bias towards, you know, music that, according to your standards, is more worthy of young people’s attention?

S Look, Greg, that’s a wonderful idea. Not only the youth, but people of any age would most likely benefit from such a bias. You should come over to have a coffee with the team. We can always use talented people with interesting ideas.

G Well, thanks for the invitation, I may take you upon that one of these days Doc. But in the meantime, make sure you delete all your macros and gizmos from our music, alright?

S We’re on it, Greg.

G Ladies and gents, Dr. Stratton, the mad scientist that got a little too much of that mad science in our ears.