Lured by the rings

Back in the summer of 1967, in a burst of mischief, the Beatles decided to conclude their four-track masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with several seconds of looped nonsense, followed by a few shrill tones that could only be picked up by dogs’ ears.

The idea was that humans couldn’t hear the notes, but any dog in the vicinity would perk up its ears and look around, baffled.

And now, we’ve become just like that dog.

Internet forums are noting a new phenomenon among cell phone users: "phantom ringing." Also known as "fauxcellarm" (false alarm, get it?), it is that strange sensation that a cell phone is ringing somewhere, but you can’t locate where it’s coming from.

Anybody have this experience yet?

Audiologists are finding that this is no psychosomatic condition: people are, indeed, hearing something that sounds a lot like a cell phone to their ears. Unfortunately, it’s often occurring in the middle of a pop song, or along with the whir of a vacuum cleaner, or the hair dryer, or the sound of keys jingling.

People are not going nuts. Audiologists call it "the sweet spot." It’s located somewhere between the 1,000 to 3,000 hertz auditory zone, that place where car sirens and babies crying register plaintively on the tendrils of our inner ear.

But with technology, and our reliance upon it, the distinctive wail of the cell phone has replaced the baby’s wail as the tone most demanding of our attention.

Why this is deserves lots of expensive research — or at least my own flip armchair analysis.

Research has already shown that diddling around with superfluous gadgets — like cell phones — on the job can lower our IQ more than a few tokes on a marijuana joint. This stands to reason: any superfluous task that distracts you from the job at hand is going to slice and dice your mental capacity like a Ginsu knife.

Then there are recent reports linking cell phone use to brain cancer — yet somehow, this information has not been sufficiently alarming enough to make cell phone users break the habit.

Now we have cell phones causing us to hear phantom voices in our head — but they’re not really phantom voices, because the reaction is triggered by actual sounds at similar speeds of vibration in our environment. Why is this?

"The most controlling device in our life right now is the cell phone," says Peter Arnell of the marketing firm the Arnell Group in New York City. He told The New York Times recently that the cell phone’s ring can even trigger emotions — an effect that is not lost on advertisers.

Those people who have noticed more high-pitched electronic tones appearing in advertising jingles and TV ads are probably not losing their minds — or their cell phones. They’re just being played like a cheap Casio keyboard. After all, if cell phones can get our attention, why not use similar-pitched sounds to make us focus on annoying ads? Sounds like subliminal advertising to me.

But the question remains: does this effect appear only with regular cell phone tones, or also with "gimmick" ringtones, such as the much-shared "Hello, Garci" download?

If any country deserves to be the place for massive research on this subject, the Philippines is it.

As it is, Filipinos are pretty much conditioned — à la Pavlov’s dog — to leap up and swivel their heads madly at the trill of any cell phone. Their ears perk up. This is especially true in Manila, where the most popular ringtones are a) the recognizable phone ring from the show 24, b) the Mission Impossible theme by Lalo Schiffrin and c) the annoying voice of Kit from Knight Rider saying: "Excuse me, boss, you have a text message…"

But Filipinos are awash in various cell phone sounds, with hundreds of variations offered daily for downloading by cellular companies that want your phone sound to be "unique." One solution, according to my STAR editor, Amy Pamintuan, is not to turn your phone on until noon. She claims the phantom ringing is just a manifestation of our overstressed lives: "Before, people used to see dead people. Now they hear phantom cell phones."

At times like this, I’m glad I have a boring old Nokia that won’t accept any exciting new ringtones; this way I can usually pick out my nondescript phone sound from hundreds of others. But it has made it difficult to access my ideal ringtone, which would be Bernard Herrmann’s slashing strings theme from Psycho.

And now, to put the official Pop Culture Zeitgeist Seal of Approval on the phenomenon, horror writer Stephen King has even come out with his take on cell phone overload: his new novel, Cell, posits an America in which cell phone users are driven to homicidal frenzy by an electronic pulse sent through their Motorolas, Sony Erickssons and Nokias (though he’s careful to avoid any brand names). Is it farfetched to imagine a world where people are driven to dangerous distraction by their electronic gadgets? Hey, we’re already living in it.

Somewhere, Pavlov is probably smiling. Maybe even salivating.