Blog
Stories of Sound
and Sleep:

OneClock Talks / Part One / Why

  • Jamie Kripke

OneClock founder / designer (and second-generation clockmaker) Jamie Kripke discusses the who, what, where, and why of OneClock in this multi-part video series.

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Go Dark

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Waking up to sunlight streaming in through the windows is a great pleasure, but is it worth sacrificing your health and wellbeing? When it comes to good sleep, there is beauty in darkness.

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Make Something Wonderful

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

The newly presented archive of Apple founder Steve Jobs prompts a reflection on why we love the personal computer.

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Tis the Gift to Be Simple

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

With unlimited access to content of all kinds, we can house a lot of ideas in our brains. How do we practice mental minimalism?

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OneClock Reads: The Creative Act

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s book “The Creative Act” inspires a way of being that extends far beyond the studio.

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Loving and Leaving

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

What if we told you that the best way to have good sex was by keeping your bed to yourself—by sleeping alone?

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We’re Listening

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Contemporary listening lounges draw on the jazz kissa, a 100-year-old Japanese tradition involving vinyl records, cocktails, and high-fidelity audio equipment.

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Midwinter Days

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

On Finding Meaning in Winter: There’s a lot to love about winter, if you’re looking for it.

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Waking up to the Power of Naps

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

There are precious few things you can do in your life that will have a greater positive impact on your health, mood, and longevity on Earth than sleep—and not all of it has to happen at night. If your energy wanes and you find yourself dreaming of nodding off soon after lunch, rest assured. You’re not the only one with sleep on the brain.

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Rewrap the Gift

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Our holiday traditions around giving and receiving are due for a redux. Here are our tips.

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How Do You Sleep at Night?

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Your chronotype determines when and how well you sleep, and much about how you feel while awake—but few people know what theirs is, or how to live in harmony with it.

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OneClock Reads: Super Normal

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

In Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fakasawa draw our attention to the phenomenon of everyday objects.

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Get Up!

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Tune your body and mind with some Valentine’s Day morning sex. Or, why we recommend getting down while waking up.

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Fitter, Happier, More Productive?

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

The near constant use of technology in contemporary life can be overwhelming, affecting our health and relationships. Use a less-is-more approach to find physical, mental, and emotional balance in a world dominated by devices.

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Buy Nothing, Sleep In / Thoughts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

As the Black Friday alarm rings at its early hour, we invite you to make a new ritual of sleeping in. And then, once you wake up? Go sit and have coffee with your mom, dad, kids, neighbor, or dog. Watch the sun travel across the kitchen window. Appreciate. Connect. Make it a thing.

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In Your Dreams

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Humans spend several years dreaming, yet this phenomenon remains mysterious in both purpose and meaning.

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A New Way for the New Year

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

It’s that time again! The New Year invites us to set intentions for self-improvement and change. Here’s how you can best prepare for a successful refresh.

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The Snooze Button is your Frenemy

  • Jamie Kripke

If you find the idea of quitting the Snooze button intimidating, look at it this way: Snoozing does not equal sleeping. Snoozing is a sad, stressful imitation of real sleep.

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Scaring Yourself Awake

  • Jamie Kripke

From the adrenal gland’s point of view, there’s no difference between the shock of that blaring alarm and the sight of an incoming tsunami. And why would you want to start your day like that?

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A Brief History of Alarm Clocks

  • Jamie Kripke

It seems clear that the need for alarm clocks will never go away. But if the 1787 version of the U.S. Constitution can be amended 27 times, can’t we evolve our alarm clocks, too?

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Product Before Price

  • Jamie Kripke

We set out to make exactly what we wanted, not what the market wanted. The price is what it is because that’s where the price ended up once we'd designed the clock we wanted.

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Sing to Me: The Power of the Human Voice

It was a gray day, as most in San Francisco are, when I visited the Janet Cardiff installation at Fort Mason, a former military outpost now operated as a cultural center at the city’s edge. I was there to experience Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, the Canadian contemporary artist’s renowned audio installation involving forty speakers and a piece of sixteenth-century choral music.

In the gallery space, which overlooks bobbing boats and buoys and sidelong seagulls swept up in the wind, forty black speakers were placed in the round. They were arranged in eight sets to match the structure of the score, with five speakers in each set representing the five vocal ranges: bass, baritone, tenor, alto, and soprano. They stood tall and stoic, directing the space but otherwise not asking for much. And then, they began to sing.

The logic of The Forty Part Motet is simple. Each speaker emits one voice from the chorus, providing various listening experiences. Standing close to one, you hear the singularity of that particular piece of the composition; standing in the middle of them all, you hear the dynamic whole.

Cardiff has said about the piece that it explores her interest in “how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way.” For her, the eleven-minute Motet illustrates “the piece of music as a changing construct.” Despite my not knowing the words to Thomas Tallis’s “Spem in Alium,” or even the language being sung (Latin), I identified with the voices, the immense rising and falling sculptures of sound. Around me, people wept or smiled or closed their eyes or did any and every combination of the three. Our expressions became a secondary performance.

The clarity of a single voice is a remarkable sound, but it was the confluence of all forty that filled me, like a levitation. I felt lifted like the buoys I saw out the window, sent adrift with the gulls. I am not an aficionado or even much a fan of choral music, but in seven years, the Motet hasn’t left my memory. Maybe it was its invitation to inhabit a score kinetically by moving the body from note to note, or the agency it offered to alternate between contraction and swell: to be with one and then many, singular then numerous.

Or maybe it was that hearing the voice of your species in song does something really uncanny and mysterious to your body and mind.

Earlier this year, a group of neuroscientists led by University of Rochester Medical Center professor Sam Norman-Haignere, a former MIT postdoc, released findings showing a set of neurons in the brain’s auditory cortex that respond specifically to singing.

Building on fMRI research from 2015 that showed the brain’s high response to music, this team used electrocorticography, a brain-monitoring method usually performed on epilepsy patients about to go into surgery, to test participants’ responses to over 150 noises. In the cacophony of test sounds, including traffic noise, barking dogs, flushing toilets, and even instrumental music and non-musical speech, these neurons lit up only to the voice in song.

The why behind this novel finding remains unknown, but researchers agree that the neural ability to distinguish between auditory nuance is key to human evolution and survival. It makes sense that the brain would use its neuroauditory abilities to identify threats, but even more fascinating is the opposite: that the brain is just as often listening to ascertain safety—and that the sound of it might be singing.

Singing together has been a form of community-building for all of human history. Like birds chirping in the dawn chorus to tell their flock they’ve made it through the night, people sing to demonstrate their vitality and build resilience. Look no further than the practice of protest, or at the rituals of any one of the world’s many, many religions. Singing a collective message is powerful and unifying for those singing it, and communicative to those listening.

But it’s not just about the words. In his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem explains how singing, humming, belly breathing, buzzing, and rocking can all be used to regulate the soul nerve—his term for what mental health professionals call the vagus nerve or wandering nerve—on a cellular level. Imbuing the body with musicality regulates breathing and heart rate, lowers blood pressure, and can lift the soul by formulating a sense of connection to self and others. These are, as Menakem explains, practices Black communities have used for centuries to persevere through enslavement and its ongoing aftermath.

The human voice is extremely individual and dexterous, able to express at least twenty-four different emotions in non-verbal “vocal bursts” according to UC Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine, which makes its ability to achieve common ground in song, whether sung in unison or four-part harmony, pretty impressive. And, no matter how unique its frequency, it is always going to register as a human voice, eliciting a variety of memories and emotions for those receiving its timbres.

The voice isn’t commonly referred to as an instrument though that’s exactly what it is, in both senses of the word. It’s a music-making device and also a tool. The intimacy and efficacy of it was recognized by Jon Natchez who composed OneClock’s original waking tones and incorporated two vocal tracks. Back in the room with forty speakers and forty voices singing phrases written 500 years ago, I felt this instrument’s influence. I didn’t know that a small slice of my cranial cortex was illuminated or that an evolutionary response was being activated or even that my soul nerve was being regulated. I just knew that it sounded beautiful, that it felt good to hear, and that even in my silence I was part of the chorus. I didn’t want to stop listening.