On my way home from work yesterday, I heard a very interesting commercial on the radio for Fifth Third Bank.  As far as the script or the overall message of the ad, I haven’t a clue; I retained none of it.  What did stick out, however, was the low base hum that queued in right as the add started.  I immediately start laughing and thought to myself – are they using a binaural frequency?  Electromagnetic waves are a funny thing: we can’t see or touch them, but they effect our emotion and mood in a very powerful and compelling way.

I started to wonder the future of marketing, and if predetermined frequencies would be added as a subtle undertone underneath commercials to elicit a desired emotion from potential consumers.  Binaural beats can unknowningly make us more alert and energetic, aroused or paranoid, or even relaxed in a meditative state.  I first discovered these frequencies with a program called I-Doser, which advertised itself as a brainwave dose for every imaginable mood.

The thought of binaural marketing quickly tailed off into binaural music.  I began to hypothesize if they could construct a song that tickled the brain just right, or enthralled the listener with energy or rage, depending on the type of musician, the genre and what message the artist was trying to send.  I could not help but see some sort of correlation with the resent explosion of dubstep music and the famous wobble effect it is known for.

It really makes you wonder about the future of both advertising and music, as both, more or less, target specific human emotions.