MISC 44: Subliminal Advertising
In the 50s some people were outraged to learn that their subconscious could be hacked by Machiavellian messages and images hidden in the mix behind the music or in-between the frames. To learn more about these times do a little search for James Vicary.
Ad agencies, propaganda operatives and magicians all understand how susceptible we are to misdirection and suggestibility. This is in part because we unconsciously predict the next sensory signal and rely mostly on surprise before engaging the attention circuits, doing a ‘double-take’ and updating.
If you experiment with the number of frames per second (fps) of a video, then once you get to about 24 it looks continuous, passing by like you experience waking reality. The mind is not parsing the individual frames so there is room for editing skullduggery like changing one of them to Vote X.
Similarly, in the recording studio if you create a unison synth line of a guitar part and slowly lower its volume relative to the guitar in the mix, there comes a moment where even you who made it can’t be sure it is still audible or just the imagination. In both cases, the question remains whether these unconscious cues are being filed away for influence or not.
Composers take advantage of our predictability when employing a technique called implied harmony - the idea being that if you intend to loop a melodic line and add a series of common counterpoint harmonies to it, then after a few iterations the original line is no longer necessary because the listener will simply retain it while the loop concludes.
Take a listen to this episode of Nudge to learn what’s going on at the frontier of music marketing in 2026.
WTF….unscrupulous agents in the past were at least trying to disguise their dubious methods.
Word of mouth is the gold standard within any tribe. When a fellow musician recommends a band, I don’t hesitate to queue it up because I know they would have seen them playing their instruments live and have felt the natural urge to share for the benefit of the band and my musical well-being. Not so from the denizens who work for corporations hooked on payola and ad revenue, or the likes of Chaotic Good.