On Insomnia and Digital Soundscapes
Most nights, I fall asleep to the sound of stranger’s voices. Tucked between me and my partner, Julianna, is a noise-machine we leave on to keep the quiet out of the room and to help us sleep. She’ll often prop her device on its side against a pillow so she can curl up opposite it: big spoon and tiny spoon, face to face. I lie in that secret space behind the screen, and watch her as she watches, unmoved, blue light flickering on her glasses. It’s cozy, the three of us.
Julianna flags after maybe a quarter hour of watching her feed, which from my side out the bed sounds kind of like a post-modern soap opera, the characters and plot changing every few seconds. I know she’s asleep when I hear the video looping. I reach over, click off the phone and put it on the bedside table. I can’t stand to hear the looping. I need the endless forward motion of the scroll—the promise that I will never have to know silence. I flip my pillow and close my eyes, knowing sleep won’t come easy. The fan whirs. Taylor Swift’s new Tik-Tok hit “The Fate of Ophelia” bounces around in my head. I begin to compulsively replay memories with Swift’s looping pre-chorus as underscoring: me falling off the stage during my Mardi Gras-themed middle school production of Romeo and Juliet; my cringe-worthy performance as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream prompting the student director to cut my monologue; my friend Mateo reciting Hamlet during an awkward moment of quiet on a recent drunken night out. “To die, to sleep.” His eyes locked on mine. “To die – to sleep.” Taylor keeps looping. I don’t even like the song. I reach for my phone, which has fallen between the bed and the wall, and let the sound in.
Quietness is the painful prerequisite for sleep. At least for me. Julianna needs noise, and will slip heavily into sleep, as if by anesthesia, when sung the 21st century lullaby by her For You Page. It’s a nightly tragedy when she leaves me. Trying to sleep next to someone who is already asleep awakens in me some sad jealousy, like each bed only has a limited amount of sleep, and there’s not enough to go around for the both of us. It’s isolating to be left alone to fight through the day’s largest trial. I’d rather not have to fall asleep at all, but if I have to, can’t I at least have some company? This pattern has been recurring since my childhood when I shared a room with my brother, whose sleep hygiene included a brief fight with me, followed by immediate relaxation into REM. I was left to stare at my bedroom ceiling long enough that I could spot the cracks in the plaster from past earthquakes, before convincing myself to get out of bed and take a lap through the house. That was the advice my pediatrician gave me: If you can’t sleep, get up, walk around, read a book. On the way to the bathroom I would pass my grandfather’s microphone, which rested on top of a wardrobe in our living room as a monument to his career in news radio. It had a haunted quality after dark. The black and yellow 1010 WINS flag beneath the receiver looked like a pirate flag, and cut through the soft browns and burgundys that were mostly everywhere in the house and desaturated into a flat dull mass when the lights were off. It called attention to the silence of the place and the absence of my grandfather, and suggested a threatening link between the two. I’d go to bed for the second time that night and try to shake the quiet. Mostly I’d just end up thinking about death. I’d imagine my family’s total annihilation from a nuclear warhead dropped by North Korea, or Russia maybe, I forget. But the older I got, the more abstract the fears became, the more existential, until they ultimately merged into a single, simple fear of sleep.
After my grandfather died, my brother tattooed the waveform of his WINS sign-off on his forearm. It looks sort of like the logo for the Cisco company or an EKG reading. There’s an app that supposedly can scan the tattoo and play back the sound, but the edges of the thing bled into my brother’s skin, and the one time we tried the app it didn’t work. Despite the tattoo’s illegibility, or the microphone’s anonymity (it has no name or picture on it), these symbols suggest an implicit belief within my family that the soul, or at the least the soul of a radioman, can be captured by tiny resonating plates and stored indefinitely on wax or in digital files or even in ink blots on skin. The incompatibility of my brother’s body with this app in order to conjure the ghost of my grandfather, speaks to what I’d come to understand as a trialogue between me, my devices, and death. My fear of sleep grew so large that it could not hold metaphor: sleep simply became death. And to ask yourself to die each night is untenable. A potential solution came in 2009, at the end of 8th grade, when I was gifted an iPod Touch. It was then I realized I had a choice: rehearse for my own death or look at a screen.
The internet felt advanced at the time, but looking back, it was actually beautifully simple. It was a place for genuine discovery and communication. It had borders that made it feel knowable. The amount of content was exciting, not overwhelming, like a well-organized library that had all sorts of niche sections. There was some hierarchy of information, where sites had specialties. There was no “everything app.” It’s hard to remember, but social media feeds wouldn’t scroll forever in those days, they’d just end. Short form content wasn’t all that short back then, although you could feel the foreshadowing of the parasocial relationships to be built. YouTube was built around personalities. Early viral videos were centered around a named person like “Charlie Bit My Finger” or “David After Dentist.” Susan Boyle’s shocking turn on Britain’s Got Talent was far and away the most popular video in 2009, containing within it an entire hero’s journey and perhaps marking the beginning of the internet as a clip show. Virality and individuality diverged later on as the amount of content grew, but vloggers foretold what would become the center of online content, the collapse of the space between spectator and performer—you, watching the watcher, watching the thing (the thing is usually like a plane crash or a gender reveal). I personally watched Charlie and David and Susan, but also I loved movie trailers and music videos. The sounds they contained were familiar, like the TV playing in the living room. With the tiny speakers a whole world could be in my bed at night. It was my first exposure to the personal sound device. Noise on demand. The early hours of the evening when I’d listen to my parents and their friends chat and laugh could be extended indefinitely through the chatter and laughter in my hand. It was almost a satisfying facsimile.
Back then, people spoke differently on the internet than they do now. The algorithms were weak in a way that made it feel like users had a semblance of control. It wasn’t based around the feed as much as subscription, personality, niche interest. Where my grandfather’s radio voice had the self-awareness of large scale broadcast, the early internet vloggers experimented with a type of intimate vocal performance. YouTubers were kids alone in their rooms, collectively building a new type of speech full of idiosyncrasies and “what’s up guys.” They relaxed in the long form. YouTube channels were like TV shows that would run forever, the characters sharpening, aging even, over years of direct transmission into the bedrooms of teenagers everywhere.
By the time short-form content appeared on the scene, the algorithms had transformed into the expansive data-driven noisemakers that we know them as today. The subscriber model still exists in a hobbled form, but the feed reigns supreme. No need to tell the machine what you want, it already knows. The sheer amount of information that is available now is staggering: ninety percent of all the data in the world was created in just the last two years. Because of this, online speech has morphed into something much more general than before. It is quick and loud by necessity. It is defined by paradox. It is both flat and exaggerative; aloof, but conspiratorial. It is the deafening whisper of ASMR. It is both human and computer. But not so human that you would confuse “A-day-in-my-life” with your friend telling you about a day in their life. There is no silence ever. YouTube’s notoriously strict copyright rules limited the presence of recorded music on the platform to licensed videos, live covers, and original music. Not so on TikTok, which is uniformly underscored. In traditional film, underscoring is anchored by an emotional logic. On TikTok it’s Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For,” playing while a girl films herself crying, or it’s Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For,” while a guy spends money at different locations in New York City. The logic here is rooted in optimization and profit, as record labels look to push sales and creators look to hop on musical trends to land in front of as many viewers as possible. The emotional effect, however, is muddier, especially when this song is consumed in the fractured and repetitive succession that TikTok demands. Billie herself says it best when she croons, “I don’t know how to feel…”
My friend Zach shared some personal research he’d done recently tracking the lyrical density over time in the music of Panic at the Disco, a band he loves. I could sense a real feeling of loss from him as he charted an inverse relationship between the rise of short-form content and decay of Panic’s signature explosive talk-singing. His discovery had confirmed something he already knew was happening: a flattening of genre, of specificity, a removal of that essential thing that allowed him to claim art as his own. The algorithmic homogenization of music means shaving minutes off of songs, shortening the distance between beginning and chorus, getting rid of bridges, doing whatever it takes to remove the active engagement of the audience. The feed demands passive engagement and asks the user only to hear, and never to listen.
If my parents didn’t have friends over, or weren’t watching TV, they’d end the night with my mom asleep on the couch and my dad playing piano in the living room. He had a particularly slow approach to the piano, decidedly opposed to the online music listening experience. He’d play the same song for months at a time. Some favorites were “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song,” which he’d play year-round. My father is a professional musician, but not a professional piano player, so his technique was centered around big chords and a liberal use of the sustain pedal. He’d take these long pauses between chords as he adjusted his fingering, which, together with his other techniques, lent the music a tone of real melancholy. Once I got out of bed to ask him to stop playing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” because the doubling effect of the song’s composition and his arrangement made it simply too sad. Those sounds are the earliest memories that I have of bedtime. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire in July in California. The sounds I hear in my bed now feel like copies of copies of the original sound, my misguided attempt to replace its unique quality with the internet’s generic quantity. The internet leaves no room for absence, no way to see the empty space left behind by the sound that really matters. There’s something sadly entropic, even deathlike, about our technology’s push for expediency and generality. How could anything cut through the noise we’ve created?
Bed time is the listening time of the day. In sunlight, days thrum with the sound of forward motion. Right now, the clack of my keystrokes is serving to distract me from self-conscious rereading, inward contemplation, the swirling gyre of existential doubt that is always underneath the room tone. The click-clack, the coffee pot brewing, the electric whir of the refrigerator, footsteps upstairs, construction down the street: the diurnal phonics of motion and normalcy. The more I hear, the less I think. Or maybe it’s not thoughtlessness, but something deeper: a prehistoric response, a biological instinct to take those tones, like the middle frequencies of human voices, as a sign you’re safe, you’re not alone. At night, sound is sparse, and distinct, standing out against a blanket of emptiness. White noise, silence’s true opposite, contains all audible frequencies in equal measure. It’s what you hear when you play every short form video on the internet all at once, which is something we, the global citizens of this good earth, attempt to do each night as we fall asleep.
In 2021 I deleted all my social media, but there are still a few websites I traffic. I find comfort in YouTube Shorts’ limping algorithm, which feels like the low-dose version of TikTok. The ads are obvious and bad, the suggestions are broad. Sometimes it’ll even show me the same video twice. There’s something unchanged in its DNA that lets me draw a straight line between my childhood and my current bedroom, like a makeshift telephone with empty cans connected by a string.
I’m putting my ear to one of those cans on a recent night, scrolling mindlessly while Julianna sleeps beside me. I’m moments into a video of an online cook making grapes from scratch, whatever that means, when my phone dies a dramatic halting death, the onscreen cook freezing in twisted recognition of his digital prison, before he and the rest of the pixels are swept away into oblivion. In the blackness my eyes still see the cook’s white silhouette, like I had been staring at the sun. There’s a moment of brief relief, before the thoughts rush in, where I’m just floating in darkness, relaxed in fatigue. But it’s not long before my mind whirs back to motion. I scroll through my thoughts, which I’ve learned to loop like the videos on the phone. I do a routine review of every decision I’ve ever made, bureaucratically rubber stamping each one as the wrong choice. Then a rapid succession of clicks sit me up. Living in New York City for the last decade has left me burned by unknown nighttime sounds revealing themselves to be all manner of things, none of them good. The clicks happen again, this time louder and fuller, with a robust brassiness. I hear movement outside my window, so I lift the blinds and find myself face to face with a grey squirrel. The squirrel freezes, and stares into my eyes, an acorn in its hands. The sun is just starting to rise behind its head, which is usually one of the worst sights an insomniac can see, but now it makes me feel nothing, in a nice way. I move inadvertently, causing the squirrel to drop his nut and bolt for a nearby tree. I lay my head back down on my pillow and close my eyes. I hear the squirrel click again, then a car, then Julianna rustles and shifts onto my chest. “Scroll for me,” she mumbles. My charger is too far to reach now, so I stroke her head and sit in the silence.
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