In the 1950’s, unlike today, TV broadcasts had a daily shelf life and at some time in the morning, say 3am or so, after the late movie and some nebulous local half hour show no one watched, the voice-over announcer would explain that the broadcast day had concluded and would return at such and such a time. Then they played the national anthem with the flag waiving away and then, boom, nothing but static and white noise.
When I got up around 5:30am on Saturday mornings for cartoons I deliberately got up a bit early, before the programming day began so that I could watch and listen to the test pattern. Oh yea, the test pattern. That was traditionally the precursor to actual programming that came out of the signal-absent white noise and usually displayed a low-tech calibration screen with a head-dressed Indian in the middle of it. Accompanying that image was a high, steady tone that hummed away for 30 minutes or so and it was that intoxicating hum I was after.
Perhaps it was the musician in me or the simple sonic lure but I used to sit right in front of the TV, in somewhat of a trance and hum along with it. I might have been employing some kind of yoga meditation without even knowing it.
Humming right on the tone kept it steady but moving above or below the pitch, however slight, would cause the tones to start oscillating against one another. If I was relatively close the oscillation was quick but when I moved farther off pitch, the tone would get wider and slower and I basically played with those tones for all of the time leading up to cartoons. These are all basic acoustical concepts but I had distilled the science down to pure, geeky fun.
But it wasn’t just humming fun I was attracted to. The half hour of test pattern humming went unusually quick, as if time had been suspended…another indication that I was surely on a psychological surfboard to utter serenity. Unfortunately, about the time I had reached a complete understanding of the universe (known and unknown), Heckle and Jeckle or Mighty Mouse would come on and drag me back to my childhood.
I don’t think I was a particularly odd kid but as an only-child with no distractions, something like a 400 Hertz sine wave was a perfectly viable plaything and it appears that I had inadvertently stumbled on the electronic approach to nirvana. It makes me wonder what the potential childcare application might have been if I had introduced the idea to the public and become kind of a Buddhist P.T. Barnum.
Thousands of little kids humming away at their sine waves, no longer acting out but completely zen and one with the kid next to them. No more ADD drugs being dispensed like candy. No more restraining orders being taken out by teachers. No more pulling hair on the playground. Nothing but meditative, spiritually attuned minors with a penchant for poppy seed muffins and virtuosity.
Ah, but with the demise of the test pattern on modern television, all that potential peace and harmony have signed off forever.
