Analog SFF, May 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  In the moment it took him to prepare his Stratocaster, Gaston directed at Eris a silent soliloquy peppered with colorful words and anatomical suggestions that would never appear in Reader's Digest. Of course, this wasn't the first time that one or more band members had performed while pharmacologically indisposed. But even if his still spaced-out comrade didn't open her mouth, at least she was nice eye candy for the crowd.

  The assembled connoisseurs of contemporary rock increased their enthusiastic cries of delight as the band launched into the opening riffs of its latest hit, Chlamydia Blues. Gaston grinned when he saw Eris bring the microphone to her lips on cue and add her voice to the ear-splitting drums and fuzzed guitars behind her. But his face fell just as quickly when he realized she wasn't mouthing the song's lyrics.

  In fact, she wasn't even singing words. While the band's stock-in-trade repertoire certainly didn't require it, Eris had a professionally trained voice and enough vocal range and talent to make a tolerable Queen of the Night. The hauntingly sweet soprano syllables trilling from her throat like a celestial lark's hymn were like nothing anyone present had ever heard before. A decade ago, when he was still teenage Les Flatt of Gassville, Arkansas, one of Gaston's favorite pieces of music was the Bachiana Brasileira No. 5. Compared to the soaring melody reverberating throughout the auditorium, the Villa-Lobos work's vocal line sounded worse than a cawing crow with laryngitis.

  The hoots and whistles from the audience, distorted guitar licks, and pounding percussion shaking the building slowly faded away in a great decrescendo. Finally the sole sound to be heard was the lone female voice on stage endlessly repeating that same arresting refrain. The only things moving in the auditorium were Eris's lips and the slight rises and falls of thousands of spellbound chests.

  Then a second sound began to reflexively imitate her hypnotic song. The single quiet notes strummed on Gaston's guitar grew into crashing chords that were soon joined by the band's other instruments. Drums mimicked the ever-repeating music's rhythm while amplified steel-cored strings played those arcane melodic sequences over and over. A moment later the auditorium rocked again as the entire audience hummed, whistled, or emitted open-mouthed “ah-ah-ah” sounds in the same rising and falling pitches.

  Maintenance crews and other employees arriving the next morning heard the great chorus inside, puzzled over it for a moment—and then they, too, were entranced and joined their voices to it in rapt response. Whoever heard the song forgot all thought of food, water, hygiene, or anything besides singing it until their bodies collapsed and voices failed....

  * * * *

  "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a terrorist attack of unprecedented magnitude."

  The dozen men and women gathered at the long table in the Washington conference room gave worried nods. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security continued, “The reports you've just been handed give the latest figures on how many millions of men, women, and children have been incapacitated or died so far. Many injuries and fatalities were caused when people driving cars or trucks—even some railroad engineers and aircraft pilots—were suddenly affected while listening to radios, music players, or other electronic devices. Others occurred when people performing risky jobs, like construction workers building a skyscraper or nuclear power plant personnel, became ‘mesmerized.'

  "And the number of reported casualties continues to grow by the thousands as more victims are identified. Naturally, all our official news releases should downplay these figures to prevent more panic among the public and must emphasize preventative measures."

  The Undersecretary for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis raised her hand. “My department is coordinating with the FBI, CIA, and other agencies to discover who is responsible for this attack. Unfortunately, there are still no tenable leads.

  "This attack was so unexpected and its sources so many and hard to track to their point of origin that it may be days before there's even a glimmer of hope. Even if we do succeed in finding the culprits, that won't help the people who've already been affected or prevent more from being stricken by what these terrorists have done."

  The secretary nodded. “Please keep us informed of your progress."

  The Assistant Secretary for the Office of Health Affairs said, “My staff was contacted by an expert who believes he knows why all those people have gone insane. He's received the appropriate security clearance and briefings, and he's waiting outside now. With your permission, Mr. Secretary, I'd like to have him join our meeting."

  "Please bring him in."

  The stranger escorted into the room by two dark-suited Secret Service agents was of average height. His sandy hair was graying at the temples, and he limped slightly from an old college football injury. His blue eyes were sharp and clear, reflecting a confident intelligence.

  After settling into the empty seat offered to him near the secretary, the man straightened his tie and scanned the faces of the assembled government officials. There he saw a pleading for even the tiniest crumb of hope he could give them.

  His voice was deep and resonant. “Thank you for inviting me here. I'm Dr. Gabriel Steaman. I've been a neuroscientist for twenty-five years. For the past decade I've been director of the Institute for Neurobiological Research at Boyce University. And I may be responsible for the disaster that's struck this country and others throughout the world."

  Several people at the table gasped. Others seemed to expect the Secret Service agents who'd brought this mad scientist into the room to wrestle him to the floor and haul him away to jail after that brazen confession. Steaman quickly explained, “Of course, I personally had nothing to do with it. But I suspect the research that my associates and I at the university have done has been twisted into a powerful force for destruction."

  A portly official sitting across from Steaman sneered, “Did your work involve weapons research for the Department of Defense?"

  "Absolutely not! It involved biomusicology."

  Steaman noted the puzzled frowns his words produced. He continued, “Over the past few years my research team and I have co-authored several landmark papers published in major science journals. Those articles reported the results of our studies on how the human brain processes and understands music. This research involved having various volunteers listen to music while we assessed how their brains responded to it."

  He noticed a middle-aged woman wearing heavy makeup sitting at the far end of the table turn slightly pale. Guessing what she might be thinking, he said, “No, we didn't saw off the top of anyone's skull and stick electrodes directly into her gray matter. All our tests were noninvasive. Most of these techniques have been used for many years, like positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Although they do it in different ways, both tests help pinpoint what parts of the brain become most active due to external stimuli, such as listening to music. When a part of the brain works harder it needs more blood and oxygen as well as ‘food’ in the form of glucose. That part ‘lights up’ on PET and fMRI images and shows us that it's doing more work at that moment.

  "We also measured event-related potentials using electroencephalography and performed magnetoencephalography to study electrical and magnetic activity in the brain. All those techniques and several newer ones were employed on a large number of people with a wide range of musical aptitude and training. By exposing them to a variety of music written in many different styles, we performed the most detailed mapping ever performed of where and how the brain listens to, processes, and responds to music."

  Steaman sighed. “While our work was essentially basic research, we hoped it might also have practical applications. There's an overlap between the ways a person's brain understands and uses both language and music. For example, what we learned might be translated into a treatment for an individual who's developed an expressive aphasia—an inability to speak the words he wants to—after a stroke. Perhaps, by having him listen over a long time to types of music we've found to be par
ticularly stimulating and effective, his brain might recruit undamaged areas within it that he uses to process music as alternate pathways to improve his ability to speak.

  "Or perhaps composers might use what we learned to write more powerful and effective pieces of music. There were certain sequences of musical sounds—patterns of pitches, rhythms, and harmonies—that nearly all our volunteers responded positively or negatively to as measured by their brain activity. The ones they enjoyed stimulated not only the auditory cortex, but also other parts of the brain—like those in the limbic system and the nucleus accumbens—associated with emotion and pleasure. Sounds they didn't like increased metabolism and altered electromagnetic fields in areas of the cerebral cortex linked to sensations of pain and avoidance."

  The Undersecretary for Science and Technology's weather-beaten face frowned in thought. He murmured, “Being able to write a piece of music that strongly appeals to people could have other practical applications too—like for advertising agencies. Some TV and radio jingles I heard over fifty years ago were so catchy that I still remember them. The music in those commercials must've helped sell millions of dollars worth of products!"

  Steaman's shoulders sagged. “I'm afraid someone who read our research has used it for something much more treacherous. Instead of creating music to sell something, that person or persons used it to injure and kill!"

  The secretary drummed his fingertips on the tabletop. “I don't understand what you're getting at. Did the music all those victims were exposed to damage their brains?"

  "I don't think their brains have been damaged—rather, they've been ‘hijacked.’ Of course, what I'm proposing is still conjectural. None of the people affected are in any condition to tell what happened to them. But I believe this explanation is most consistent with the known facts."

  Steaman looked around the room. “I believe all those people's brains have been ‘infected’ by the most powerful earworm ever created."

  The eyes of several people at the table widened with recognition. But most of them gasped in disbelief. One of the latter, with memories of the second Star Trek movie flickering through her mind, ventured, “How could millions of people get a parasite in their ears at the same time? Is this ‘earworm’ you're talking about so small it can float through the air after someone sprays it into a room?"

  The neuroscientist replied, “No, it's not literally a worm. The term is an English translation of the German word ‘Ohrwurm.’ It refers to musical material, such as part or all of a song, that gets stuck in a person's mind. The affected individual can't stop thinking of the tune for hours—even a day or more. Not surprisingly, musicians are particularly susceptible to developing an earworm. Women are also more likely than men to acquire one. Our research found significant differences in the way the brains of musicians and nonmusicians respond to music, and more subtle ones between women and men, that helped elucidate these different vulnerabilities to earworms.

  "A normal earworm is merely an annoyance. Afflicted individuals can still think about other things and perform their usual activities of daily living even with the offending music looping within the auditory cortex and certain other areas of the brain. But the kind all those millions of people in this country and others were exposed to is like the song of the Sirens in The Odyssey. I believe it's some sequence of sound and rhythm that resonates inside a person's brain so strongly it takes over his whole mind. Although this is only a crude analogy, think of it like the note in a singer's voice that makes a crystal goblet break—only instead of those vibrations breaking glass, it shatters those people's sanity."

  The Assistant Secretary for the Office of Public Affairs whispered, “And it makes them turn into what the media call ‘zombies.’”

  Steaman nodded. “After exposure the victims enter a state bordering on catatonia as they focus nearly all of their consciousness on the music playing inside their brains. Even worse, the only physical action they've been observed to do is to try to reproduce that deadly song by whatever means they can. Some hum it. Others try to sing it. Those with access to instruments attempt to play it. There have even been instances of affected individuals singing that music through a public-address system or at a concert and disseminating their insanity to thousands of other people at one time!

  "The net effect is that this deadly music spreads like a plague. With rare exceptions, anyone who hears it becomes infected too."

  The secretary said, “Do you have any idea who's responsible for this attack, Dr. Steaman?"

  "Our research was published in journals readily available at any library or over the Internet. The resources needed to create a sonic weapon using our data could be as simple as a desktop computer and professional-level music sequencing software."

  A woman said, “Are you saying this attack could have been initiated by a single mentally disturbed teenage hacker?"

  "That's possible, but the evidence suggests it was the work of some well-organized group with extensive resources. I believe it would take a great deal of experimentation on human subjects with different sounds to determine which combinations were most effective. Also, it's clear the terrorists’ earworm was released nearly simultaneously from many different sources, including those that required a high level of technical sophistication to access.

  "The classified information I was given to review suggests that hundreds of radio and television stations as well as cable and satellite TV systems had their signals interrupted by this ‘super earworm’ or it was superimposed on the audio portion of their programs. Infected music files in MP3 and other common formats were also apparently uploaded to a large number of servers used for peer-to-peer and other forms of file sharing. I suspect some were attached like a computer virus to legitimate files—or, ironically, perhaps they acted as a self-replicating worm in the computer sense after being downloaded to someone's computer. Also, the types of music people were listening to when they were attacked covered a broad spectrum from classical to country, rock to reggae, jazz to easy listening, and so on. This suggests that there might be not just a single super earworm out there but many, in styles that mimic different musical genres."

  He shrugged. “But as to what specific terrorist group or even government might be responsible—well, your department and others are in a far better position than I am to determine that."

  The secretary said, “You've made a persuasive case for the cause of this disaster, Dr. Steaman. We already knew it had something to do with sound, but what you've said provides us with much more detail than we had before. It's fortunate that a handful of rescue workers in various parts of the country accidentally discovered how to protect themselves when they tried to help victims. Those individuals were affected more slowly than colleagues who were also exposed to the music at the same time, and they reflexively covered their ears with their hands before the effect fully took hold. Based on what they reported about their experience, earplugs are now issued to anyone near a quarantined zone."

  Steaman replied, “I've also read reports of isolated cases of individuals being naturally immune to the music. It's known that about 1 to 2 percent of people never experience a ‘typical’ earworm. I suspect a small fraction of those same individuals are also resistant to this much more virulent variety. The reasons for that immunity might include—"

  The secretary interrupted, “We can discuss that later, Dr. Steaman. Our immediate concerns are how to prevent any more outbreaks and, if possible, restore those who've been affected back to health. Do you have any suggestions?"

  Steaman answered, “Yes. As I'll explain in a moment, there are many things that can be done to reduce the odds of further infections. As for finding a cure—I'll need official approval to have a small number of victims transported to my laboratory for examination. We'll test those patients, try to determine what kind of music triggered their catatonic state—and see if we can find some way to end that endless cycle of sound in their brains."

  "Perhaps this is a fool
ish question, but if anyone who hears this mesmerizing music you're talking about becomes a zombie, how are you going to safely study it?"

  "That's the simplest part of our problem, Mr. Secretary. As I said before, the affected individuals seem compelled to reproduce the music as well as they can. We can record the sounds they make by using a microphone connected to a computer with music sequencing software. Those sounds will be translated into a graphical output that shows what rhythms, pitches, dynamics, and so on they're composed of. Reading only individual notes and tiny sections of the music should be reasonably safe. We'll just have to be careful not to read too much of the sequence ourselves at the same time."

  The secretary said, “This has all been very informative, Dr. Steaman. We're anxious to hear more from you, especially your suggestions on limiting the spread of this plague. However, I've heard enough to convince me that the president should be informed of this immediately. I'm going to have him join our meeting."

  He asked an aide to bring a telephone from a nearby stand. With the device now resting in front of him on the table the secretary pressed its speakerphone button. As a dial tone buzzed noisily in the room he entered a top-secret phone number that routed his call to the White House. After a few rings he and the other members of his department heard an official-sounding voice at the other end of the line answer. Told who was calling and who was required for a teleconference, the Secret Service agent answering the call said, “I'll put you on hold for a moment and inform the president."