Music to His Ears
Despite the name of his band, he's no queasy
stowaway. Frontman for the Motion Sick, assistant audiology professor . . . Michael Epstein, PHD'04, is taking sound to a whole different level.

By Lewis I. Rice

If you love rock-and-roll concerts, you know the feeling.

You've rushed the stage to get as close to the band as you can. The music coming out of the towering speakers is loud, so loud it seems to invade your body, moving through your chest, up into your throat, up inside your head.

Long after the last guitar lick has faded away, the sound stays with you—and not just in memory. You're left with the fuzzy sensation of cotton balls stuffed deep inside your ears. When you finally put your head on your pillow and try to sleep, a persistent ringing is your early-morning soundtrack.

Michael Epstein, PHD'04, knows the feeling better than most. He experienced it in the 1990s as a young fan of industrial-rock groups like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. He's even given it to audiences himself, performing in a variety of bands since he was a teenager.

But, unlike most music aficionados, Epstein can explain exactly what happens when ears are exposed to the shock of thunderous concerts. He is one of the few rock musicians who can claim on his list of professional credentials an expertise in "otoacoustic emissions" and "binaural hearing." Not to mention "loudness."

From a lifelong fascination with science and a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering, Epstein has molded an academic career that draws heavily on his love of music. He's an assistant professor in Bouv?'s speech-language pathology and audiology department, and the director of Northeastern's auditory modeling and processing laboratory, which studies the ways people process and perceive sound.

Yet, along with his work in the classroom and the lab, Epstein still pursues his musical passions, too. Recently, his music career picked up a good deal of steam with the debut of his latest and most accessible band, the Motion Sick, which released a critically acclaimed first album late last year.

Epstein is the creative force behind the group. He writes the songs, a distinct blend of quirky lyrics and melodic tunes. He's also the frontman and lead singer.

His life as a musician—besides the Motion Sick, Epstein plays in a harder-edged punk band—takes up at least twenty hours a week, he says. That's on top of his full-time Northeastern day job. He says he doesn't like downtime.

And, though most people who pick up a guitar as a teenager put their music dreams aside as an adult, Epstein says he plans to remain devoted to both his academic and his artistic worlds.

"I've had people tell me, ëYou're going to have to give music up or make a decision between the two different things,'" he says. "And I just kept saying no, I don't have to. And I haven't had to yet."

"Every depressing song rings so true"
There are no "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" lyrics on the Motion Sick album, entitled Her Brilliant Fifteen.

Epstein's songs aren't quite as easily digestible. Take "God Hates Kansas." What seems on the surface an antireligion polemic in fact springs from Epstein's favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz. Watching it one day, he realized the Wicked Witch's hat resembles the pointed hats Jewish people were required to wear centuries ago in Spain, something he remembered seeing in an illustration as a child in Hebrew school.

That's about the most straightforward analysis of his compositions the professor will offer. Epstein understands it's perfectly natural for people who've heard his music to ask what the songs are about. In a perfectly good-natured way, he won't tell them.

"I feel it really takes away from a song if you tell somebody what your intentions were," he says. "Most of the time, if it relates to them or connects with them in some way, then whatever that connection is is going to be more powerful than whatever I tell them my connection is."

Facing a promising future: The Motion Sick's Matthew Girard, Jane Allard, Patrick Mussari, Epstein, and Travis Richter.

Even the band's name has multiple layers, Epstein explains. It's Victorian-era slang for stowaways, the kind of esoteric reference he enjoys. Plus, he got motion sickness a lot as a child.

In 2004, before Epstein formed the Motion Sick, he brought twenty-odd songs he'd crafted over the last several years to Boston producer Jordan Tishler, of Digital Bear Entertainment. Together, they chose eleven songs and recorded an album, emphasizing the songs' melodic elements and adding surprising touches, like a banjo—even turning one into a 1950s-style slow-dance tune.

"The process was one of defining who he is and what the band would stand for," says Tishler. "I think he's dynamic. I love to watch him perform. For him, this stuff is so fundamentally heartfelt that he puts it all out there and gives it all away. I think they have the potential to be a national act."

Though Epstein wouldn't mind rock stardom, he's not looking to play arenas either. His commitment to Northeastern and his students remains his top priority, he says. Still, that wouldn't preclude his playing a couple of gigs a week and touring in the summer. "Somewhere in the low level of popularity would be my ideal," he says. For now, he's hoping the band gets picked up by a small record label and continues to expand its fan base.

Listeners have compared Her Brilliant Fifteen with the music of several popular bands, including Weezer, Wilco, Violent Femmes, and Arcade Fire. Boston magazine called the album "24-carat radio fodder" with "irrepressible, and indelible, pop choruses." In April, Spin magazine named the Motion Sick its "Band of the Month," praising Epstein's "cheeky literary wordplay."

For all the arrangement tweaking Epstein did in the studio, he was intent on keeping the wordplay intact, often meshing melancholy images with a dance beat. Many of the lyrics mine unfulfilled longing: "Even if I had a satellite, I could never reach your brain." "Let's go for a walk in the moonlight, so I can fail to say what I feel." "I follow the pathways, but they always converge at the same place."

He smiles when he says he's sometimes accused of writing depressing songs.

"That's why I act so out of place"
Growing up, Epstein lived devoid of hardship in a quiet Long Island neighborhood. He has nothing bad to say about his parents, his three younger sisters, or any aspect of his family life. Early on, though, he found himself chafing against the normalcy and ease of his surroundings.

He adopted a goth look, painting his fingernails black and wearing the most outrageous clothes he could find. As often as he could, he'd go to New York City to haunt West Village record stores and attend concerts. He picked up a guitar and started his first band at age sixteen.

"I really think there's this amazing suburban boredom that leads people to search for something, because it just feels like a horribly mundane existence," he says. "In that setting, it's hard to feel like there is something out there you're driving for. There's no real goal because you're always in this comfortable, flat existence."

His parents didn't say or do anything to try to change him, Epstein says. They figured it was a phase.

They weren't completely right. At twenty-nine, Epstein still stands out from the crowd. His dark hair is parted down the middle, and long sideburns frame his face. He's exceptionally thin, a build that's natural for him, he says. He's followed a vegan diet since college. Animals suffer as humans do, he says, and he can survive just fine without hurting them.

Epstein's fianc?e stands out, too, particularly when she's onstage. Sophia Cacciola sings—some might say screams—in a punk band called Blitzkriegbliss, in which Epstein plays bass. Epstein met her when both were performing at open-mike nights at Club Passim, in Harvard Square. They now share a Somerville, Massachusetts, apartment and plan to marry next year.

Because of her stage persona, Cacciola can initially intimidate people, who imagine she's some unhinged Courtney Love clone offstage. They're surprised she is, in reality, nice, Epstein says. But who you are onstage isn't always who you are everywhere else.

"In music and in the world, there are two different people," he says. "As a performer, the more you're able to separate the two, the better off you are."

"The ringmaster twirls his mustache and bows to the crowd"
Behind the stage hangs what appears to be a large painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Next to it: A sign for Miller High Life.

The strange juxtaposition somehow works for O'Brien's, a dive rock bar in Allston. A television in one corner flashes Keno numbers while one near the bar broadcasts a Red Sox game. A moose head mounted on the wall wears a baseball cap.

At nine-thirty, the Motion Sick, the first of three bands to play tonight, are about to begin.

The band members have dressed like it's semicasual day at the office. Epstein wears a red shirt, a black tie, and black pants with white pinstripes. The three other men in the group—Patrick Mussari on guitar, Matthew Girard on bass, and Travis Richter on drums—sport ties and slacks, too. Keyboardist Jane Allard wears a white blouse that would be suitable attire at the software company where she works.

To get ready for moments like this, Epstein sang and played guitar at open mikes for a number of years. Though he never sang in his former bands, he always felt he should be expressing the words he wrote.

So he took voice lessons that, in his estimation, turned a very bad singer into a fairly bad singer. His voice is overly nasal, he says, but he's worked on techniques to temper that. He's also worked on feeling calm about presenting himself and his art to strangers.

"I used to be terrified of public speaking," he says. "When you bring that to music, it's even more terrifying, because you're standing up in front of people and expressing something that's meaningful to you. There's a fear of some backlash and ridicule."

Onstage, Epstein mentions the name of the band for the first of several times. The musicians start with a couple of fast songs to warm up the crowd. A few more audience members trickle in—about forty are here on this cool Thursday night in May.

The group launches into "The Day After," a song with a strong pop hook, and the crowd moves to the beat. Then Epstein throws them a curve. "This is our square-dance song," he says. "So grab a partner, and do-si-do." Most likely no one's ever do-si-do'd in O'Brien's before, and they don't tonight to "The Most Beautiful Dead Girl." But there are some appreciative whoops.

When things simmer down midset, Epstein tries to nudge the audience back to life. "Very quiet out there," he says between songs. "Everybody's really, really appalled or really, really asleep." Coincidentally, he sings about sleep in the next number, with his own twist on the subject: "Now you roll back your eyes and fall asleep like my grandmother did when she died."

Near the end of the forty-minute set, the musicians play one of their favorite songs, Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart," their only cover of the night. (Later, Epstein sheepishly reveals the other cover the band sometimes plays is the Kelly Clarkson hit "Since U Been Gone." A silly song, he says, but it's got good instrumentation, and people recognize it.) Before he signs off, Epstein thanks the other bands on the bill and O'Brien's for hosting.

The bar's booker, who goes by the name Shred, deejays the local-music program on Boston powerhouse WBCN-FM. He's played the Motion Sick on his show. "I look for something that's going to lure the listener in, and I thought they had a nice indie pop sound," he says.

Shred used to scout bands for major record labels, but he says he still can't predict which bands will make it and which will fall short. Success takes talent, luck, and, especially, a dedication not everyone is willing to muster.

"If you're not willing to give up a certain amount of yourself to go for it," Shred says, "then it's like looking for the golden ticket."

"Stimuli in myelinated nerves"
Teaching, according to Epstein, is a lot like performing in front of a crowd. You're not exactly entertaining in the classroom, but you are trying to get an audience on your side and open to hearing something new. One difference: If a student heckled him during a lesson on the anatomy of the ear, he says he wouldn't take it as personally.

Epstein's own education in science long predates his musical exploits. When he was three, he asked his parents to take him to the library so he could look at astronomy books. As early as elementary school, he enrolled in precollegiate courses in computer programming, rocketry, and geology at nearby Stony Brook University. "I always knew that math and science were the fields I was better at and interested in," he says.

He also knew he wanted a career in academia. Though his scientific bent would make him prized in the more remunerative for-profit sector, he hates the idea of working in the corporate world.

"I've always been interested in being in an environment where I have the freedom and the resources to pursue what I'm interested in," Epstein says, where "you're free to do research—as long as you're successful—in whatever you want and whatever way you want."

At New York's Binghamton University, Epstein earned a bachelor's in electrical engineering, a major that plugged into his interest in science and music. He came to Northeastern to do doctoral research in sound and signal processing. His thesis examined otoacoustic emissions, the audible vibrations the inner ear gives off in response to sound stimulus. By putting a tiny microphone into subjects' ear canals, he found that people's perception of loudness is connected to how much physical activity occurs in the inner ear.

Epstein's written on otoacoustic emissions and loudness for academic publications, coauthoring several papers with Mary Florentine, PHD'78, the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Audiology and the director of the communication research laboratory.

"Professor Epstein is an excellent teacher and researcher, and he has a delightful sense of humor and a kind heart," Florentine says. "The word on him is getting around, and he is building a strong international reputation for his research, critical thinking, and his ability to transmit his ideas."

After receiving his doctorate, Epstein began teaching both graduate and undergraduate classes at Northeastern. As much as possible, he tries to integrate music into the classroom, such as demonstrating how music might sound to someone with a hearing loss or a cochlear implant. "People get more excited about those things if you have music as the carrier rather than somebody counting to ten," he says.

He conducts his research in a Forsyth Building lab dominated by something that looks like a large rock-concert soundboard. In Epstein's experiments, a subject in a booth listens through headphones to sounds at different levels and frequencies, sent by a computer. The subject answers specific questions about the noises—which is louder, which has a higher pitch, for instance—using a small terminal connected to the computer.

Epstein regularly takes part in experiments himself, which means his own hearing has been screened many times. He has acute hearing, a better-than-average ability to detect sound. Though that would appear to be a good thing, he says, many people in the field believe such acuity sometimes precedes a degradation in hearing. Now, when he performs, he uses a set of musicians' earplugs, specially molded to fit his ear canals, which helps prevent such hearing damage as tinnitus, the persistent ringing that can be triggered by prolonged exposure to loud noise. Tinnitus happens when a damaged cell falsely relays information that creates the perception of sound, Epstein says.

He never wore any kind of earplug when he was a kid going to concerts. Most people don't take such precautions, he says, because they believe—incorrectly—that hearing aids correct hearing loss as easily as glasses fix vision problems. Plus, a music-loving teenager just doesn't think much about protecting his hearing, even if he's a young scientist, too.

"Everyone only remembers your mistakes"
As Epstein sets up for rehearsal at eight o'clock on a Monday night, he talks to one of his bandmates about scheduling a hearing appointment.

The practice room is about the size of a walk-in closet, a rented space in Watertown where the band converges once or twice a week. A black sheet with a skull and crossbones hangs inside the door next to a lava lamp. Stringed lights flash on the ceiling. A box of disposable earplugs sits on a shelf next to a CD by the beloved Boston band Mission of Burma; its lead singer quit the group because of tinnitus.

After Epstein put together Her Brilliant Fifteen, he auditioned musicians for the band. In the end, he turned to people he already knew, including two he went to college with. They're easygoing with one another, apologizing about making mistakes as they rehearse, with the occasional good-natured expletive thrown in. "We're not usually this bad," Epstein jokes.

There's a lot of discussion about chords and progression and tempo and bridges. Although everyone takes part in the conversation, Epstein is perceptibly the leader, the others turning to him for the final word before they press on. They work on a couple of songs from the album, playing each at least twice, before trying for the first time a new song called "Losing Altitude." "I feel like a pilot who's lost the nerve to fly," Epstein sings.

The song's too long, he acknowledges; some of it has to go. They play it over and over for almost an hour, each time a little differently, following suggestions thrown around the claustrophobic room that's heating up fast.

"What do we do?" Richter, the drummer, asks at one point.

"I don't know," Epstein responds. "That's why we're here. Figuring it out."

Though they don't quite figure it out, by the time they play the song for the last time it sounds much better, everyone agrees. They exit the room around ten-thirty but sit in the hall for an impromptu meeting about future gigs and promotion ideas. Most of the band members are slumped on the floor, exhausted. About fifteen minutes later, everyone starts to leave.

Epstein says he's a bit tired, too, but also energized. When he gets home, he won't go to sleep right away, he says. He'll tend to a few things for his Northeastern job. He does some of his best academic writing at two in the morning.

He's already worked all day and all of the night, as the old Kinks tune goes. But the professor who's been accused of writing depressing songs seems genuinely happy to work some more.

Lewis I. Rice, MA'96, is a freelance writer living in Arlington, Massachusetts. He profiled Margaret Bad Warrior, L'04, an attorney for the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, in the Summer issue. To hear the Motion Sick's music, go to the band's website, at www.themotionsick.com

His Brilliant Five: "instant" Karma

Many great pop recordings, audiology expert and musician Michael Epstein says, pivot on something he calls an "auditory instant," or "a moment that encapsulates the song's power, movement, and emotion, and has the rare quality of being both jarring and beautiful."

Here, Epstein describes five of his favorite such instants (the point at which each begins is indicated in elapsed minutes/seconds).

1. Simon and Garfunkel, "The Boxer" (1:03)
"Without warning, the subtle, dense arrangement is shattered by an industrial eruption, building a sturdy foundation for the purely phonemic chorus. The reverberant clang has made "lie la lie" an anthem of success through failure for nearly forty years."

2. Spiritualized, "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space," original arrangement (3:20)
"When this song was first recorded, the arrangement was structured on Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love," with at least three vocal trails intertwining throughout. Legal issues kept the record from seeing widespread release. The later, more commonly available version is still one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded. But the original's sampled choral rendition of the Elvis song remains the definitive instant."

3. Public Enemy, "By the Time I Get to Arizona," unedited version on Apocalypse 91 . . . The Enemy Strikes Black (2:53)
"Lyrical content asideóPublic Enemy's politics are unapologetically controversial-this song's chorus rests upon pitch-adapted recordings of screams from a Civil Rights protest. When the screams start to carry the main melody, the medium has become the message."

4. Kasey Chambers, "The Captain" (0:27)
"In the studio, vocalists often lose their voice for a moment. Generally, missed or gasped words are filled in by retakes. However, in this otherwise carefully arranged and engineered alt-country song, Chambers's raspy 'stand my ground' inserts a spike of character into the first verse."

5. The Smiths, "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" (1:54)
"Steven Patrick Morrissey is the master of hyperbolized woe. A lifetime of study of his wordplay couldn't differentiate the sincerity from the tongue-in-cheek irony. 'Last Night' begins with a disjointed, minimalist piano caressing a recording of crowd noises culled from the BBC sound library. Anticipation builds. Suddenly, the song bursts into full instrumentation with the wry opening quip, 'Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me. No hope, no harm, just another false alarm.'"

  Photography by Tanit Sakakini