#spider rambles far too much
I listen to a lot of music from the dark ambient and drone genres. Like, a lot. It tends to provide excellent soundscapes, feelings of being somewhere or immersed in a concept through unstructured noise or heavily structured repetition. It’s good for focusing. For example, I once happily listened to an album at work, all the way down to the quiet, staticky denouement. …Which, after five solid minutes, I realized was actually the sound of the ceiling fan over my head.
Dark ambient can often have a deliberate affectation of unease, malaise, or even malevolence. But I usually don’t find it to be unsettling. In fact, if combined with the right visual stimulus–trees waving in the wind, a nice vista, a candle flame–it can be pleasantly hypnotic, or even bring on a wild sort of joy, a sort of overstimulation I’m sometimes prone to experiencing. For another example, I once was sent into a wide-eyed, ecstatic state when my commute home from work suddenly revealed the sunset over the crest of a hill… because I was listening to a song called Putrefaction Chamber.* Yes, really and sincerely, this is what happened.
Now, this is all leading somewhere. I’m finally getting around to listening to The Black Tapes today. For those who missed the boat like I did: it’s a fictional podcast done in documentary format, where the reporter and narrator gets drawn into investigating a series of cases that a paranormal debunker can’t explain. Well put together so far, though three episodes in, my three main takeaways are this:
- Dear lord, I hope nobody with untreated psychosis or paranoid schizophrenia found this thing, because I can see how it could really freak somebody out. The first case file seems to have drawn on a common form of hallucination as a seed idea for the story, and did its best to sound as real as it could, and then up the spooky factor.
- I’m getting the impression that if they ever ‘interview a biologist’ on this thing, I’m going to find out how dense the meaningless word salad in their ‘expert consultations’ can get.
- Constantly marinating your brain in dark ambient music completely kills the spookiness of episode three. Spoilers for this one below.
The episode investigates a supposed unexplained sound, which the story pushes the listener to assume is demonic or actively harmful in nature. They play a sample of it, with a disclaimer beforehand. Tells you to put on headphones. I’ve already got giant chunky ones on, so I’m all set. They play the noise, and…
“Oh,” I think, “That sounds familiar. Is it Kammarheit? Or maybe Cities Last Broadcast? Or what’s that one with the–”
And then I remember that The Black Tapes is produced in the Pacific Northwest, and the prolific Cryo Chamber dark ambient label is based in Oregon.
So now, while the podcast is spinning a conspiracy theory about a sound that kills people, I’m coming up with my own, sillier conspiracy theory linking together PNW audio professionals in a plot to make a podcast.
*I recommend the whole album Putrefaction Chamber is on, and the Cryo Chamber label in general. However, one of the songs on the album has, for Spooky Aesthetic Reasons, the sound of a crying infant in it. If anybody would like a version of that song without the random baby solo, I made my own cut of the track to remove it. I might be into the shimmering sounds of the dark expanse between stars, but I cannot and will not tolerate baby noises, apparently.
Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. So, when SIDS still occurred, parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.
Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. (…) Harrington explained what she was told about the cause of her child’s death.
“Nobody could tell me. They just said it’s a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn’t sit well with my scientific brain.”
Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.
"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault,” she said.
(…) As the cause is now known, researchers can turn their attention to a solution. In the next few years, those in the medical community who have studied SIDS will likely work on a screening test to identify babies who are at risk for SIDS and hopefully prevent it altogether.
A couple extra details from somebody who works in genetics–there are genetic conditions that can produce SIDS-like results, if the mutations are harmful enough. I don’t know off the top of my head if those act through the same mechanism as this was found in this paper–insufficient activity of an enzyme called butyrylcholinesterase (BChE).
However, this paper’s findings are very important. They show that when BChE doesn’t work as efficiently as it should, SIDS can happen. They were able to measure this from blood samples taken within 2-3 days of birth. That’s also big, because not all conditions are detectable in blood tests, but this one is. They were using an experimental test to do this, so as they say in the article, it’s not available as a screening test yet.
And lastly, they don’t yet have a treatment regimen. They have a target now, and experimental trials can begin, likely starting in lab animals. But it’s going to take a few years before a treatment is available for general use.
Overall this is a big accomplishment, and hopefully it will soon yield results that can lead to its inclusion in newborn screening test panels.
