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Unintended Aural Consequences of MP3 Compression
zenst writes "A rather interesting read about possible damage to your hearing due to the way most audio compression techneques work. They mainly work by presenting a signal that the brain perceives to be the same as the original and it is this assumption that could effect our hearing and the way we hear."
I'm downloading 512kbps version songs of my entire library right now to avoid this!
Got to yet read this article, but do u people wonder the same for other things like .wma/.ogg for audio or for that matter .jpeg/.mpeg for video... i guess such studies will soon follow too !!!
I thought my hearing was going from turing my speakers all the way up.
Mess Stuff Up
I wonder if it is mis-inforamtion, to discredit MP3s in general. Not having read the link, I am an idiot.
There are many reasons for hearing loss and tinnitus that have nothing to do with what you listen to or what volume you listen to it at and everything to do with, for instance, degenerative diseases of the inner ear. The article doesn't provide much to persuade me that MP3s are going to make people go deaf.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
And here I thought this had to do with unintentionally downloading mp3s of Limp Bizkit songs...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Knowing them... they might try giving money to help the military research sonic based weapons and get something to fight those pesky pirates!
Then again I suppose it will also depend on the quality of the speakers, and what frequency range they can properly output (as well as the soundcard and encoded track).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I listen to punk and hardcore music, so I don't think it matters what kinda compression is on my music, my hearing is gonna be lost either way!
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
'But a continuous consumption of datareduced audio could possibly lead to fatal consequences' How? Why? Nowhere else in the article is even the start of a reason for this statement. I at least expected to see something along the lines of not hearing that semi while crossing the street. Remember, MP3s, along with marijuana, can kill you.
I am concerned about anything that can affect my hearing. As one of the many many many thousands of people who already has significant hearing loss, I find it frustrating that I am almost forced into exposure to things that could make my hearing worse.
Do I smell a lawsuit? Nah. I just wish sometimes for a return to quieter days where my poor, remaining eardrum can cope without hearing trucks, airplanes, shouting from my neighbours, etc etc. I even work in a library and it's too damn loud.
Tv ruins your brain, mobiles give you cancer, junk food makes you fat, computer monitors ruin your eyes and now they say mp3s cause hearing loss.
Is there anything left that wont slowly kill or mame you over time? They wont be happy until I'm sitting in a darkened padded room eating a liquid only diet.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I know people with inner ear implants must take several months to re-learn to hear. The implant produces sound patterns different than normal, but over a few months what is percieved as normal adjusts. Love him or hate him, this is what has recently happened to Rush Limbaugh...
The author presents only speculation, no evidence or mechanism. In fact there is a barely concealed paranoid rant about the mass media and DRM. By now MP3s are in sufficiently wide use that real hearing problems should be noticeable, yet I am aware of no studies or other complaints showing this to be the case. At worst, this is probably a "cell phones / power lines cause cancer" type nonissue.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
One of the major causes of tintinitus is driving with your window open. Faster, highway driving causes a roar that will damage your hearing. The common symptom is the roar won't go away. IANAD though.
Tinnitis may occur for any number of reasons.
Maybe the the record labels and the motion picture experts group thought it would be funny make people deaf by listening to pirated music...or maybe it was a plot by the government to alter hearing in order for them to broadcast subliminal messages? heh
i listen to mp3s all the time and i can still tune my guitar or violin as accurately as an electronic tuner. sounds like that article was written by a conspiracy-theorists + audiophile pseudo-scientist.
these people had touble hearing to begin with.
heh... does not...
Moderation total: (-1 Didn't use preview)
This is a crappy article. The case isn't made AT ALL. There is no data to back up these claims. It is a hypothesis, nothing more. Couldn't you do better slashdot?
The author of the article seems to lack any relevant qualifications, any proof of his ideas, or indeed basic proofreading abilities.
He does say that CDs are overpriced though, so it must be worth posting on Slashdot.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
LAME produces more than decent mp3 files. Did I mention it's open source?
MP3 is what's used for sharing because it's what's used for sharing. If MP3 wasn't the predominant file sharing format, people wouldn't encode in it. MP3 is the predominant file sharing format because it's what people encode in.
I decided to forego the keen opportunity of spamming "FIRST POST!" Instead, I grabbed a mirror, so others can read it after the
mirror
'Tis the season to be giving, and I can't afford the cash to keep Mandrake afloat... this is all I've got to give!
I wonder if the industry plans to lobby Congre$$ to absolve the industry of responsibility for any hearing loss endured by a large part of society, much like the pharmaceutical industry was recently absolved of responsibility for potential side effects of certain vaccines. I don't know, have any /.ers read the entire Homeland Security Act? Maybe they snuck it in there somewhere.
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
That sounds more like psuedo science than anything coherant. If listening MP3 can damage the brain, what's next? Watching JPEG pictures can damage visual cortex? Viewing MPEG/WMA/AVI/etc. movie can cause eyeballs to fall off from the sockets?
In 1988, I worked with a guy who was a stereophile (sp?). He soldered his cable connections instead of just plugging them in, because the air gaps between the plug and the socket could ruin the sonic quality of the music. He had one chair, wood, in the center of his audio room, and that was all the furniture. He had a structural vibration isolation setup that looked like an Erector set that had gone through a transporter malfunction. Etc. He swore to me up and down that playing a CD would damage my stereo equipment. The little square waves that go up and down would go through the wires and tubes, and their sharp edges would damage the equipment that was prepared for nice round edges. Maybe he felt that the little square waves would scrape off the inside of the wire? I dunno, at that time I used zip cord to connect my speakers. Three years later, he bought a CD player. He spent something like $5K on it. (This was in ~ 1991.) The more things change...
I'll be more likely to believe this when I see it printed in a peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal.
:)
For all we know this was secretly put out by the RIAA
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
good points
Surely that's a good thing - your brain being able to deal with lossy audio. Maybe listening to MP3's while you're young means that your brain gets trained up for frequency loss in old age and fills in the gaps?
As a healthcare provider and someone that works at Mayo clinic, this article does not even merit the cursory speed read.
Sounds like an RIAA funded study.
Or is this just some crackpot's homepage? Who is this guy, anyhow? Prophet of his own cyber-religion? Sounds credible enough. I bet the RIAA grabs this and runs with it, regardless. Hmm... maybe it's part of a carefully-constructed scheme to publicly discredit and humiliate them. Oh wait, they already did that on their own and nothing happened.
Frist gets the post
I couldn't understand you.
Say again?
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
can you hear me now?
Last time I checked reality was still analog. Next he is going to say that HDTV will make you go blind. Damn and I thought it was the masturbation making me go blind.
... if everything that enters our ears is filtered through an mp3 encoder from birth.
The years of exposure to non-compressed environmental noise that any child would have (be it in the country or the city) is likely to ensure that their hearing development is never stunted by listening to too much compressed audio.
Does this mean that the RIAA will be seeding P2P networks with MP3s that contain the subliminal message "buy this CD, buy this CD"?
And I believe that listening to boy-bands will give you tinitus even if you keep the volume way down and wear ear-plugs. That's the price you have to pay for having really bad taste.
" I have however some computer games with MP3 music, but I don't excessively play them. Despite I listen to music only quietly, I have repeatedly tinitus (and thus I also suspect the data reduction in radio and TV broadcasts as a cause)"
This guy seemed intelligent all the way up to the point where he wrote that particular line. If it only took that little of exposure to lossy sound caused him to have tinitus, then why aren't people by the millions complaining of hearing problems? I'm quite surprised he'd attribute his hearing problems to his hypothesis. I think it is far more likely there are other causes of his problems.
I also don't think, from what I've read here, that we're in any real danger of suffering noticable hearing damage from MP3s. The the main reason is that we don't listen to just MP3s 24 hours a day. Not even close! We'll be surrounded by compressed sound for years to come, but it'll never replace the natural every day sounds we hear all the time. Right now, as I write this, I can hear things happening all around me that definitely are not digital. As long as that noise is there, I can't imagine that our brain would focus in on the compressed sound itself.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up against real world data.
I must just note, as others have, that there is a reason that peer reviewed, scientific journals exist. When a doctor does study this, get it reviewed and published and the confirmed by other studies (or maybe after extensive meta-analysis) I might begin to believe it.
YESTERDAY: eggs make you live 20 extra years--eat a lot
TODAY: eggs will kill you
TOMORROW: eggs will make you live 30 extra years--eat a lot.
Ha. Medical science.
This article doesn't cite anything that supports the idea that listening to compressed audio injures hearing. I've read the article twice now, and even allowing for the author being German, I don't see any mechanism described that would make sense. Best I can figure, the author is suggesting that not having inaudible frequencies in compressed audio somehow detrains us to hear them with..what result? If cutting out inaudible frequencies damaged hearing, we would all already be deaf, given that virtually all computers have long used a restricted audio range. We've been in the era of digital audio for some time now. Tintinnitus is much more likely the result of excessive VOLUME than the result of excessive sound compression. If you turn up those headphones to 10, yeah, you might start to have hearing problem. This little piece of pseudo-science will, given the tendency of the internet to publicize the sensational and ridiculous as much as the factual and useful, have its fifteen minutes of fame. Ignore it, it is baloney.
From the Article: "Unlike with compression and decompression of computer programs (e.g. ZIP), that is to say, during lossy data compression (data reduction) the original signal is not reconstructed 1:1, but to reduce the data amount, only control signals for a synthesizer programs (called CODEC) get recorded, those are optimized in a way that during rendition the CODEC can reconstruct from these an approximation of the original picture or sound signal that appears as similar as possible for the human conscious perception, but is not identical to the original signal."
Translated to English:
Lossy compression loses some of the data,
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
But a continuous consumption of datareduced audio could possibly lead to fatal consequences
Erm... how exactly ?
I did RTFA, but I still don't see how listening to MP3s will kill me
It just takes a while...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
I'm sure the RIAA is sitting back right now, feeling very good about itself.
This has gotta be more FUD from the record industry to try to reduce the threat of mp3's. Think about it. Telephones have been digitizing and sampling voice for over 40 years. You don't here people saying that will make you deaf. CD's are samples of the real analog signal, do they destroy your hearing? Hell, just about everything you hear coming out of a machine is fake, digitized, sampled, compressed in some form it is all lossy. So, should we all go back to live acoustic concerts to save our ears?
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
but to reduce the data amount, only control signals for a synthesizer programs (called CODEC) get recorded, those are optimized in a way that during rendition the CODEC can reconstruct from these an approximation of the original picture or sound signal that appears as similar as possible for the human conscious perception, but is not identical to the original signal. The danger of this exploitation of human perception flaws is that especially by lossy audio data compression sound portions get destroyed those, although the brain would not pass them to the conscious awareness, are likely necessary for the human hearing's own perpetual calibration. First off, compact discs and any other recording mechanism are lossy to begin with. The actual resolution of actual sounds should be higher than CDs, tapes, records, etc. Based on this "research's" findings, all of these lossy recordings will make you deaf. I think this reasearch is BS and completely sensational in the worst regards.
.smell my feet.
teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion
:)
That about sums the article up for me... When the Scientologists finish their peer review of this article, maybe I'll pay more attention.
The article used jpeg compression on the pictures, I'll never be able to see properly again!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
...and have occasional stomach problems. Everyone knows that stomach problems can be connected to inner ear problems. Does that mean I can write a web page about the dangers of mp3s on digestion and get /. to post my story on the front page?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I'm sorry, but the noun form of "trite" is "triteness".
You should say "what a bunch of triteness," which means the item in question has alot of a quality of being overused or hackneyed.
The phrase "A bunch of tripe" comes to mind when thinking of triteness.
but with my eyes. I look at too much porn...I mean JPEGs...and now my eyes canna adjust to the real world. The anti-aliased text on my computer screen doesn't help either.
I consider the negligently applied use of run-on sentences and poor grammer a standard for future avoidance.
This guy claim to be "a researcher of neuronomy and consciousness physics". Huh? Do a google or yahoo on 'neuronomy'.. not exactly an established field. But he did paste in a pretty complex picture of the inner ear, so perhaps he's a researcher of note.
Could this be an evil ploy by the RIAA to scare us into buying CD's again?
=If life was easy, i would be out of a job=
As several other posters have pointed out, this guy is full of shit. He reminds me of the sort of people who call in to the Art Bell show.
If anything, my hearing has gotten better since I started listening to MP3s. I remember when I first started encoding my CDs, I couldn't tell the difference between 128kb CBR MP3s and the CD source. I can't even fathom how I was able to believe that; I encode everything with LAME's r3mix preset now.
It says, basically "Listening to music with lots of information removed may be bad for your brain's neural filtering hardware. But on the other hand, it also hurts the music industry, which is good since CDs are over-priced."
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think I'll take anything said by someone calling himself cyberyogi (which he does on one of his other pages) with a grain of salt.
Oh, wait, salt's bad for me too. Is nothing safe any more?
I'll take that risk.
"Sorry, but I only use .ogg"
I don't care if you use .ogg. The majority of people use MP3 and until some sort of Oggster app creates media attention, people will continue to use MP3.
"MP3 is an obsolete proprietary format."
Holy hell! I would love to visit your world. If MP3s are obsolete, then how come there are so many MP3 players on the market? Surely once Apple listens to the benevolent Stewy Griffin, we will see the iOgg. Or would that be oggPod.
"Why anyone would use mp3 format for listening to their collection on their PC, or for sharing music via a P2P network is beyond me."
Because they are happy with it? Because they don't know better? Because they cannot tell the differance? Because their Gateway PC did not come pre-loaded with a .ogg player?
After years of listing to Alanis Morrisette I can't understand a word anyone says unless they shreak it at the top of their lungs with an angry look on their face.
I can see how, with *great* amounts of extrapolation, this might present a problem after prolonged periods of time in an isolated environment which *only* contained the offending constructions.
On the other hand, you could take your freakin' headphones off every so often, scrappy.
When listening to music, music isn't the only thing you hear. There's plenty of background noise going on. The fact that it gets filtered out so's you can listen to your tunes seems to indicate that the sensitive "circuitry" in your head is actually working just fine.
This article seems to be an idealized application of a half-baked problem.
But then, I'm no high-falootin' science guy.
GMFTatsujin
Pr0n makes you go blinde...
...
MP3 makes you go deaf...
We're running out of things to do online.
Seriously, though. In the article it mentions how the sound waves have been changed and lack certain intereference frequencies that our ears normally 'filter out' and how that process doesn't happen with MP3 since the sound is already gone. What I'm wondering is if ALL artificial sound (MIDI, Electronic sythesis [think SID music, MODs, etc]) doesn't also lack these frequencies? Sound samples would have the full range, but simple wave-forms generated electronically wouldn't. After all, those sounds aren't full range and they would also inherently lack the natural "interferences" discussed in the article.
My point is -- if they say MP3s are bad for your hearing, the should also say that electronica music, some video games, some electronic devices, and just about anything that produces sound now days could be potentially harmful to our ears.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
is this.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Even a Janitor there would be like an expert on what is or is not quackery.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
of this article is enough to make me think it's a hoax. However, the essay sure does have fancy pictures.
I'm an audio expert - I've had ears all my life.
This paper is complete crap.
I believe when MPEG decoders process an MPEG stream they recreate approximations of the sound (rather than leave them out, which is what the author seems to believe). Therefore, listening to MPEG-encoded audio is like listening to a CD with bad speakers. So by this reasoning, Dell and Gateway are slowing killing us all with those horrible speakers they ship with their PCs ;]
The article is interesting, but doesn't really convince me that lossy compression schemes are a danger to hearing. According to the article, MP3 compression and similar formats drop out the "calibration sounds" that the concious mind doesn't hear directly after a loud noise. This is supposed to throw off the neural preprocessing circuitry of the ear, and possibly damage hearing. It seems to assume, however, that the audience of the sound is solely hearing data from the audio stream.
If the quiet calibration noises from music are lost, what about the whir of fans in the room or the squeaking of your chair? Only with the thickest of headphones are these sounds drowned out completely. Even then, the distortion in the headphones themselves probably adds slight reverb after the loudest noises. There is never going to be the complete silence briefly after a loud noise to throw off the calibration. DO I know what I am talking about? Not really. Does this guy, though? Probably not. --Jason T
Well, I'm convinced.
/.
The thing that sucks is that now I have to go and delete my terabytes of MP3s, since we've all been informed that the MP3 format is dead. Wow, I really didn't see this coming.
Good thing I read
What, because this guy scanned in diagrams of the ear with German captions, he must be a serious researcher?
As you read through it the paper seems to go downhill in regards to both believability & grammar. To be honest, this has the feel of a college essay with a little too much BS (which I've written a few of myself); the diagrams are neither referenced within the paper, nor especially informative.
...) as it sounds at first. ... or if the continuous consumption of neuroacoustically datareduced sounds can lead to long lasting or even permanent damage.
Eventually, the paper does acknowledge that this is something to look into, not a reason to ban MP3s (& DVDs, & digital TV, &
Actually it is still unclear whether the consequences of such maladjustments are only temporary
The second to last paragraph is devoted to basically saying that the author is not against MP3s, which is a good idea for reducing the flamebait of this essay. But then the essay ends with the alarming (& rather unbelievable) statement:
But here definitely exists acute research need, therefore I request hereby all politicians and neuroacoustics scientists to be concerned with the danger potential of neuroacoustic data reduction...
Now, I'll agree that MP3s aren't perfect; I'll get "sick" of them every so often (when they sound to feel tinny & empty) & have to listen to some CDs or other media... But I'd have to imagine that the scratches most tapes & records have are more damaging than the acuoustic gaps an MP3 has. I can't comment on OOG because I don't use it; my portable MP3 player can't play them, so it would be inefficient to use them.
However, it is an interesting idea to try filling the gaps via interpolating the surrounding frequencies. I'd be curious if this has been done before, and how it sounds.
SuperCalendar.com - Web calendar with RSS, AIM/SMS notific
Furthermore, television, movies, and computer monitors are based on persistence of vision-- the idea that the eye and brain can be fooled into perceiving motion if the pictures are switched fast enough (in the case of NTSC TV, 30 frames per second). This is a significant "compression" of the data, far larger than the amount of data being thrown out by psychoacoustic compression. NASA uses cameras that record 10,000 fps to examine explosions and things of that nature that occur far too fast for us to perceive.
Reality occurs at a rate that technology currently finds impossible to record in full. That doesn't mean it's damaging us.
what about television and computer monitors, the unatural frame rate, luminosity and... just a sec I need my glasses... pixelation, that has to be bad for your vision.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
NT
It is obvious that the author of this article was making things up as he wrote it. But, he has an interesting idea, and someone really ought to do some actual research before we discount his loosely formed conjecture...
The gist of the article is that MP3 and other compressed sounds are missing data and that in turn could harm your hearingSimilarly, the article lacked evidence, facts and even decent hypothesis... it was so devoid of intellect that my brain has frozen up.
Time for television.
This guy definitely seems like a net-kook to me...
Well with all those pictures us geeks are sterotyped as always looking at, we're heading for blindness anyway (along with hairy palms) ;-)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
but that stuff about removing parts of the music the brain can't hear is complete crap. You can hear it, just not on the crappy equipment that most people use. MP3 is a lossy compression algrorithm which means you lose all sorts of dynamics and nuances that you *can* hear on halfway decent mid-fi gear. So there.
... (which seems quite unlikely), it would be possible to introduce random masked sounds during playback to counter the effect.
I hate to be negative, but I don't think this really belongs in the Science section. Do we have a Postulate Wildly section?
The mini-rant against the RIAA almost sounds like it was just added to ensure publication on Slashdot, since it has nothing to do with audio compression effects.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Of course, given a critical evaluation of the text itself, dismissal is a good guess. There are a lot of red flags there, especially at the end. Certainly, it's not clear to me what calibratory function the signals otherwise masked by psychoacoustic (or neuroacoustic, as the author says) compression might serve - this is the most important part of the theory, and there's no real attempt by the author to treat it in detail. But (self-consciously) little sketches like this, many of which by students with even less coherence or credibiliy, are often a prelude to important discoveries, good and bad.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
"continuous consumption of datareduced audio could possibly lead to fatal consequences"
I always knew the Britney Spears, boy band crap stuffed into every p2p and newsgroup would be the end of me. I guess Metallica wins in the end with "Kill 'em All."
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
...there could be another reason why he has tinnitus.
I find it amusing that he says: 'I am interested in "zoner" games, i.e. certain monotonous high speed skill games those are capable to create alterated states of mind.' - but remember, don't listen to mp3s cos they'll make you go deaf :)
Tim
PS. No, I'm not saying video games affect your hearing - just that it's about as likely as lossy audio codecs being the problem.
Scroll to the bottom and you'll find that this is written by "CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler, (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)."
This looks like one of many crackpot "religions" based on a few scientific terms and some mystical psychobabble. These are people that believe microwave radiation or EMF from power lines slowly poisons your soul, the world is coming to an end becuase of evil american weather control machines, the aliens have visited us from dimension Z, the ancient Mayan calendar is the key to all knowledge, astrology is a real and important force in our lives, and so forth.
Mix varying amounts of scientific-sounding nonsense, mysticism with references to eastern religions, profound realizations about the nature of space and time, and maybe a few terms like "asymptotically" to really fill the minds of morons with awe and fear, and you have yourself a religion, or more appropriately, a cult.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
He actually mentions Ogg in such a way as to suggests that as far as this study goes, they're the same thing.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
The article is an interesting read, but there seems to be one major flaw. If loud noises cause resonance, then there will still be something for our ears to filter out while listening to MP3 music.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I call hoax on this one.
I guess encoding my mp3's with 32kbps wasn't such a good idea afterall.
Hey, wanna turn off your sig before more people bitch about the spoilers??
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
So I don't think they will be using this as an argument.
Who sponsored this article?
where's all that Karma?
It would be nice if he supplied some experimental evidence in support of his claims. (Be sure to check out the rest of his web site, so you can learn about the dangers of pink light, too.)
I do wonder, though, what he means by "white" science...
The truth is out. RIAA is spreading MP3s so we can listen to Britney Spears.
Oh well, thank you.
Or perhaps the opposite, this "study" proves that if you buy CDs you will have a better hearing.
Oh well, thank you.
What really happens? It's like Tetris:
The fastest you play, the better you are.
Of course if you only listen to crap you won't perceive the high quality stuff!
News for nerds, whaaaaaaaaaaaat?
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Is this yet another ploy by the RIAA to eliminate mp3?
"Don't steal music. Or you'll go deaf. Then die."
very subtle trolling. almost had me going...
wonder how much RIAA paid them to publish this ridiculous garbage.
how about if the original signal was just totally poor quality (think cassette tapes). would this damage hearing also?
lame lame lame excuse for quality publishing.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Frankly, the presentation of the article itself brings its validity into question.
But even if the results are correct, I don't think they'd be valid under common circumstances. Mainly, BACKGROUND NOISE. Unless you're listening to music in a soundproof room, I doubt this applies.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Does anyone read/research this garbage before /. it?
You've got to be sh*tting me. How in the world did this make it into the Science category? And there are actually people debating the merit.
Same guy claims 'pink light' from neon tubes are a health hazard. Right up there with people who claim to get splitting headaches from white noise generators. To me, this "paper" is somebody looking for an excuse for his tinnitus.
Use some common sense, folks, and READ the stuff carefully. Might just as well have been published in Roswell, NM.
Oh, wait, I can hear the black helicopters now...
Poof.
I bet they recieved money from the RIAA to 'study' this concept. Hmmmmm I can see it now "An RIAA supported study has shown that mp3's make your ears fall off"
Right, whatever.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Since he basically said that he feels bad hearing is a reasonable price to pay for toppling the recording industry. And that any problems could be averted by some simple hacks without increasing filesize.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's been provet that missing visual information doesn't harm the brain and our brains are wired to fill in missing info. Read http://www.newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bin1/000602a. asp for more info.
This isn't bad for a highschooler. Once he learns scientific method he might contribute to real knowledge. In the meantime this sort of theorizing keeps kids' neurons limber.
Show me some research! While it is an interesting idea, I don't see it holding much truth. The author's principle is that waveforms are not uniform to the source, rather approximations. Therefore, the author believes that we may begin to expect such approximated waveforms rather than more exact waveforms. While this may be true, it is not physiological damage. Think of it in another medium. Just because computer monitors use an approximation of images -- that is, images are composed of relatively lossy blocks rather than exact lines and shading -- does not mean that one who uses a computer for extended periods becomes unable to notice the exact sharpness of real life images. The author's idea is also further disproved by the idea that people have been listening to altered signals for years now (think distorted guitar or compressed vocals) without documented hazard.
Personally, I don't buy what this author is dishing out. It has the stench of "anti-MP3." I'd start looking for the author's alterior motives.
You are right. People don't listen to MP3s and other compressed audio 24 hors a day. There is a world out there called real life, u know motorcars, buses, wind in trees, thunder, birds tweeting, dogs barking, people talking. For fucks sake whoever wrote that article or whatever u call it is a dickhead.
Is this a joke or something? Look at the guy's homepage. He has no real knowledge on the subject of hearing (loss). It's like reading an article by some Linux user on how to pick up women: Totally useless and made up.
This guy is a flake.
... because the common individual (like the person who submitted this item) can't tell the difference between 'affect' and 'effect'. There is an audible difference, but nobody seems to notice it anymore.
We did several studies recently and got the same results. MP3s are very bad for your ears, and listening to them can eventually cause a kind of deafness.
This seems to be unique to MP3. Tests with other formats have not caused any hearing problems.
Jon Ogg Development TeamWow, the editors of Slashdot accepted this bullshit but rejected 20 or so of my submissions? At least I wasn't full of shit.
This is just ridiculous bull crap. So is the brief mention of "subliminal messages". Normally, I would elaborate further and explain, but on this I think not. Anyone stupid enough to not immediately realize that this is bullshit is beyond reason anyways.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"(much like with those artificial press faults on some "copy protected" audio CDs, those actually violate the "Red Book" standard for CDs and already therefore don't belong into commerce since these constitute defective products declared as audio CDs)."
<sarcasm>
Wow. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon actually violates the Red Book by having no silence between tracks. I can't believe they did that. They are so evil. Its not really a *real* audio CD. (Red Book says you must have at least 4 secs between tracks.)
</sarcasm>
Is Pink Floyd "defective?"
From the author's web page:
Warning: Pink can be dangerous for health! about the stress generating, sick making and learn- hindering effect of long exposure to pink in the viewfield
I sure am glad someone is finally focusing on these severe health risks! Where are the Surgeon General's warnings about the risks inherent in MP3s and the color Pink? Why isn't CNN covering this?
I mean, it's obvious that pink must be bad for you -- just look at the grammar in the abstract. The author is obviously a severe sufferer of pinkitis, poor man.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
While I don't buy all of his ideas, it sounds plausible that the "simplified" music may desensitize our hearing. Of course audiophiles and the like will never accept compressed music, but it will be harder to introduce your typical person to classical music and its fine nuances, if their idea of music is dumbed-down thrash. Then again, the pop industry is probably more to blame than audio codecs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Next up... Read my scientific paper on how playing 3D games will eventually ruin your depth perception.
My Ass hurts.
It seems to me that Telephone/Radio/TV audio quality is much worse than the majority of the MP3/OGG's I listen too. With these technologies having been around for a generation or two or three, you would think that credible research would have already been done on the effects of electronically reproduced audio.
Everyone seems to be commenting something along the lines of "this is a bunch of bullshit". Or, "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about". Well maybe... or maybe not. He is just putting forward a hypothesis, and suggesting that some studies should be done. It's called science. Maybe he isn't qualified to make such a hypothesis (I couldn't find any credentials anywhere), but 99% of the slashdotters yelling "my MP3s are fine! he's full of it" are probably know even less about this stuff. I, for one, admit that I have no idea if this is total BS or not, but I'd like to at least see some data one way or the other...
I agree with the point that exposure to digital audio does not stimulate the brain as much as the real thing but the author's conjecture that this technology will lead to loss of aural acuity is assinine at best. People still talk to one another and have to hear a cacophony of analog sounds every day so there will be no loss of stimulation. As a species we developed this sense of hearing with far lessw available stimuli and it never went away.
Even myself however would by my current knowledge still dare to publish sometime
composed music pieces by me on the internet using MP3 or Vorbis/ Ogg data reduc
tion (but with a warning hint not to listen to them excessively)
Yeah, I bet that really brings in the crowds...
Pretty much the only thing correct about this article is the fact that lossy compression does not reproduce a signal identical to the original.
,and that is frequencies above a certain threshold. Usually anything above 18-20khz is thrown out. Using this logic, CD's are technically lossy too, since they throw out anything above ~44khz. Nobody can hear that high anyways.
When you compress something into say an mp3, it gets rid of certain things you wouldn't normally hear. But the things it gets rid of are different for different parts of the song, so what it throws out is not always the same. Well, there is one thing mp3 will almost always throw out,
The only thing anyone needs to worry about is if they spend all their waking hours in headphones, listening to low quality mp3's all day. Even if there are any risks, I don't think the damage would be permanent.
Has anyone noticed after listening to headphones a few hours, and taking them off, it takes a few minutes to get used to your environment again?
Since he used pretty little graphics in the article.
Looked on the internet. Saw information
linking it to high blood presure. So,
I lost weight, got in shape, ate better.
Problem went away. Ya, ya, shoulda seen
a Doctor; but it seems to have worked.
It's just a bunch of BS, I'm sure the RIAA would love to fill their clip with this bogus ammo.
Don't turn your speakers/headphones up too loud, that's just basic common sense. MP3 or not.
I listen to a lot of music and many times I turn it up loud at the cool parts and then don't bother to turn it down again even though I can hear it just fine at the lower setting. Just pick a low setting and leave your MP3 player at that setting (and set your iTunes prefs to auto-adjust the volume so your tunes are all the same loudness).
Maybe this is like, say, cheap sunglasses that dilate your pupils wide open but don't filter UV rays, so it damages your eye when you look at the sun. Want to save your eyesight? DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN!
Really!!
:)
I SWEAR
I'm NOT just pulling this out of my butt. I PROMISE!!!!
...then before electronic sound systems were invented, everyone was deaf. Therefore Beethoven wasn't the only deaf composer, the history books just say he is to make him look good!
...then everybody only heard mono before stereo was invented.
...then there was no math before the Babbage machine. Thus, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Newton are frauds.
...then video game players couldn't hear human voices before the mid 1990s because games didn't have much speech before CD-ROM.
...there is no such thing as depth perception because TV is still 2D. Thus no one is qualified to drive a car, or at least the people who watch TV aren't. Nor are Slashdot readers, I'm afraid.
Calvin and Hobbes has evidence that the same thing happened to color vision:
Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
Dad: They sure did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yap. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while there, too.
Calvin: That's really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily, a lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But... but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the '30s.
Calvin: So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
[Calvin leaves, meets Hobbes]
Calvin: The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.
Hobbes: Whenever it seems that way, I like to nap in a tree and wait for dinner.
Please people, it's *ckin obviously nonsense. How can something that's not there hurt your hearing?
[FUCK BETA]
Tinitus is a mystery to us. Docotrs have theories and evidence but they honestly don't know why some people get it in certain instances while others do not.
Here is an example. My mothers family when she was young went to a war memorial where a cannon was fired several times. From that day on due to the extreme noise my mother has had tinitus. It comes and goes and is rather mild most of the time.
I however am a musician and have been for 14 years. I play Bass and do so at extremely loud decibals at times yet have no problem with tinitus.
Tinitus has been tied to thing such as white noise, like a ceiling fan or running water. It has also been tied to ruptured ear drums as well as exposure to short but intense exposure to load noise. It has further been tied to deep sea divers such as Navy SEALs where they literally hear nothing but the pressure itself causes it.
Tinitus is a bit like cancer in this way. We know the symptoms, we have treatments and we can name multiple causes.
It's not impossible this guy is correct, it's unlikely as you stated but not impossible. As a musician his theory doesn't make much sense to me but that doesn't mean I'll rule it out.
This effect seems magnified if subjects have been sitting in front of CRT all day reading headline websites and not generally excercising their physical body in any way.
(BTW-Tongue firmly in cheek, no offense meant to these researchers in any way.)
Yes, there's something strange about this article.. it starts off with some interesting stuff, and then some reasonable speculation, and then degrades into some pseudo-religious political rant about DRM and the music industry.
As I read this I couldn't help but thing about RGB displays. The visual world is populated by a wide spectrum of photons of different frequencies, but due to our anatomy, our sensitivity peaks at three wavelengths, approximately red, green and blue. The entire color TV and video industry exploits this fact and achieves huge amounts of compression by transmitting three signals at these peak wavelengths. While I recognize that there are some certain mechanical elements in hearing, it seems to me that if this guy's arguments are sound, then we would have observed similar effects from watching TV-- that the absence of unperceived wavelengths would cause damage. Of course we all recognize that TV's bad for your health, but I don't think it causes the kind of damage he's alluding to.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
For this to be true those telemarketers would have horid hearing as they are listening to compressed audio for 8 hours a day 5 days a week and this has been going on for 20 years ish if not more (anybody want to find when Bell startingt compressing all the LD calls) And even worse telephones in general dont transmit full human hearing range this could have been going on for most of the last century.
Or this guy could be bitching and whining about his own problem and trying to pawn the blame off on everybody else.
Hrm wiich sounds more plausable.
No sir I dont like it.
I stopped reading after he started going on about dictators slipping propaganda into the inaudible cracks in your media.
And it started off with such promising analysis! I bet the slashdot moderators didn't read to the bottom of the article before approving it.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
This guy did little more than quote a college biology book, and scan the pictures to create a web site. On first reading the article I thought to myself, "funny, it doesn't feel like April first."
Also, even if we give this guy the benefit of doubt for a moment, there is still nothing to worry about. When was the last time you listened to MP3's and/or video games in a completely soundless environment for an extended period of time? Last few times I did it, I was at home with the refidgerator humming away, a few computer fans whirring, my chair creaking occasionally, simply put, I had lots of background noise for my ears to filter out, without my speakers adding to it. Sure, I would love to put a sensory depravation tank around my computer when playing Thief, it can really blow yuor concentration when your roomate bursts out in laughter 3 feet away from you while reading his email. But, I don't have one, and so am bombarded with small, often inaudiable sounds.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
There are far better things for that money to be spent researching. Don't waste it on junk like this.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
It's just some guy with a weirdo theory, look at the way it's written - and no I'm not complaining about the mangled English but phrases like "bombardment of infotrash". Where I come from we call these guys crackpots and they can only get published on the internet and on the 10 cent machines at Kinko's.
From the webpage cited in the parent post:
When the man artificially gets exposed to a pink viewfield,the same waking archprogram gets executed and sets free stress hormons.If the exposure lasts for a too long time,lots of stress hormons are setted free,causing a similar effect as consuming too much coffee,cigarettes or any other wakening drugs;the man doesn't get waker anymore but feels exhausted and even more weak and ti- red,because this maladjustment of his body cybernetics hinders his brain from cleaning up itself.An exposure to a red viewfield starts a similar,but weaker program,because red appears in the daylight sequence at morning and evening too,but for a longer time.
Just think of the money you'll save! I am still trying to perfect the process of "artificial exposure" to the color pink. Maybe if I change the backgroung color of my code editor from white to pink that will be "artificial exposure". I am not sure what the effects of natural exposure to pink are. Since they are still unknown I suggest that you all avoid any natural pink for now.
Lasers Controlled Games!
You should take a good solid look at Hydrogen Audio. It is the place to go for audiophiles, and reading their MP3 forum should convince you that r3mix is deprecated and should never be used any more. Instead, you should use --alt-preset standard/extreme/insane for the best possible quality at ~192/~256/320 kbps.
If you really want the best from your encodings, you could try MPC which has absolutely amazing quality at high bitrates. The general consensus at Hydrogen Audio is that MPC currently is the best lossy format for achiving purposes. Of course, nothing beats lossless and with harddrives getting larger and larger, it is getting more and more realistic to encode everything with FLAC or Monkey's Audio.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
"White science likes to call such methods gladly playing down "psychoacoustic", " black science is like, damn yo, i don't care 'bout none o dat shiot
This article is obviously written by someone working for the RIAA trying to get people to start listening to CDs and stop listening to MP3s any more.
In fact, the newer formats, such as DSM (SACD), have so many more frequenceis, that listening to these formats will, in fact, improve your hearing. So, everyone, listen to SACDs instead of normal CDs. beecause even CDs may cause brain damage.
Never mind the fact that SACDs are copy-protected 15 different ways, and that our methods for copy-protecting normal CDs have been shown to be ineffective. We want people to listen to SACDs for, well, their hearing.
Again: Do not listen to MP3s! they only damage your hearing (and promote bands which are not approved by us).
- the RIAA
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I bet RIAA was involved in this :P just another way to get us to quit listing to pirated music and buy the CD's again..
it says both mp3s and DVDs are bad, so unless the riaa has issues with the movie industry, it doesn't seem like it would be them. it also ties in the game industry and digital TV as having this 'bad sound'
This is the same Anonmymous Coward who posted that it would hurt the RIAA more than help it to bash MP3s....I just read the whole article, including the maniacal, almost cult-like rantings at the end...This sounds like the kind of person who would say that the government keeps pennies in cicrulation to get ur fingerprints and DNA through dead skin samples...definitely some conspiracist wannabe ^_^
The article makes some unsubstantiated speculation about the effects of lossy compression; however the main contribution it makes is to point out that the 'inaudible' elements introduced with the various DRM technologies could have major health implications.
The calibration argument is weak except for those who are constantly listening to MP3s.
The present cases of tinitus are unlikely the result of MP3, but more likely the result of 1) blasting music in our cars and headphones and clubs, combined with 2) the relentless background noise that auto traffic and electronic equipment generate.
By this logic jpegs damage your eyes.. You'll go BLIND... BLIND...BLIND I sez..
Maybe only because what your doing while veiwing those jpegs..
Despite the weight which a slashdot reference seems to give the article, make no mistake: this is a pseudo-science web page written by an "interesting" net personality. As a self-proclaimed cyber-yogi he is full of "interesting" ideas about videogames and religion.
In other words: read, enjoy, discuss. But caveat lector - reader beware.
Or is this a strange article. Mabe it would be good to check the source of an article before putting it on the main page. This is the author's home page.
"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
First of all, where is the journal reference? And more specifically, I expect to READ the reference as a full paper in JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine with STATISTICAL ANALYSIS.
If I recall correctly, the brain itself learns at a very early age, like from birth to age 3, to "use" the organs it has for sensory input. Assuming the human ear is normally functioning, the brain learns to selectively filter specific frequency ranges from background noise, otherwise, we couldn't distinguish speech from the noise in a crowded room, hence the problems people experience with hearing loss (in old age).
I agree that listening to MP3's that I've burned to CD using iTunes in Mac OS X is not as pleasant as listening to the REAL CD, but that first burn is usually a preliminary sampling of the music to decide if I want to purchase the real CD, otherwise it goes to the circular file. Being that I have a $10,000 stereo system, I have no use for MP3 other than to determine if I want to purchase the CD. Why go to the music store and put-on headphones that were left out in public for people to sneeze on, and pick up with their rhinovirus and booger-coated fingers? Then there's all that oil and wax build-up that absorbs into that soft, supple, foam that rests so comfortably against your ear.
If the ear and the brain were calibrated from birth on MP3-quality sound, then MP3's probably would not be so "harsh" and uncomfortable to listen to for long periods of time. And I would argue that someone whose ear and brain were calibrated from birth might find listening to uncompressed sound distressing, taxing if you will, due to neuronal overload from all the "inaudible frequencies" not present in MP3. Hell they might even develop pseudo-autistic symptoms or some other stress-related neurological symptoms.
I think the argument can go both ways in this case, but solid hard evidence needs to support the author's statements.
And we all know that in about two to three months that the RIAA will start marketing advertisements saying not only that downloading MP3 is ILLEGAL, making your own MP3 are morally and ethically WRONG, but it's also BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH. So buy the real deal folks, pay the $20/CD and keep the economy going strong!
Think of it this way: a musical instrument is tuned to play exactly one frequency (and its harmonics) whenever you hit a key/pluck a string/etc. The reason why it doesn't mess with the ear's filtering is because every physical object vibrates at a range of frequencies -- this is where we get these off-peak frequencies that get filtered out in the first place.
So what the author is missing is that when a speaker reproduces a frequency, it too will produce an entire range surrounding that one frequency, putting back the noise removed from the MP3 by encoding!
He is right that the closer we get to hearing a single-frequency peak, the more unpleasant it is. Tuning forks are an example. However a speaker can't get anywhere near the precision of a tuning fork . . .
If xeroxing a few pages from a textbook is considered "being educated" then I don't really know what education is about. This sounds like a college student who got his hands on a medical textbook.
...chicks dig aural.
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
While reading this story, ironically enough, I played an MP3 I had downloaded from Gnucleus (a Gnutella client) using a multi-host download. One of the hosts seems to have been one of the RIAA servers that sends out static; for a few seconds in the middle of the song, there's this horrible (loud) clicking and popping. I have no desire to be the one to try it, but how cool would it be if I sued them for damage to my ears (when listening to the MP3 I downloaded from them) and won. It's actually not as ridiculous as it might sound -- if I steal a candy bar, and it turns out to have cyanide and razor blades in it, I'm almost positive that I could still sue / file criminal charges -- you can't 'booby trap' things if they cause injury.
As I said, it's a stretch, but I'd love to see the RIAA ordered to pay a tremendous fine for causing hearing loss / damage to speakers.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"The research was funded entirely by the RIAA"
So it must be the author's contention that glaring irony doesn't compress well and so intensive consumption of his infotrash is juuuuust fine.
Um, people... this is a joke. This article is *satire*. (and even if it's not, it's pretty dang funny.)
However, a not to slashdot editors would be appropriate: this belongs in humour (the disembodied foot thing) not in science (the disembodied head thing)
From the sig of the article's apparent author:
**
MAY THE SOFTWARE BE WITH YOU!
I CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler I
I (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!) I
I ! I
**
To which I can only say: "...Uh?"
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
I don't think consequences will be quite that serious. Still, it warrants looking into: there is probably some adaptation to compressed audio, and that adaptation may distort the perception of regular sounds.
Scientists have discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
Research has proven that exposure to laboratories is a leading cause of cancer among rodents...
Sapere aude!
A possible advantage of the data reduction characteristic to remove all sound portions classified as "inaudible" could however even be that one could clean with it supposingly contaminated audio material (as for instance propaganda from dictatorships) from so-called subliminals (i.e. hidden hypnotic suggestion messages those are intended to get into the brain without getting into conscious awareness) before listening.
Anybody think anything else this man has to say merits attention?
Rob
Also indicative of crap: the author's warning about the damaging properties of the color pink!
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
> And I thought that was an oxymoron.
However, Bose, certainly has the market cornered for customers perceiving it to have quality. They do it all with advertising.
As an analogy for you geeks, it's like Intel's dominance over AMD, despite AMD having a cheaper faster CPU. Intel does it with advertising. Actually there is a difference. Intel makes quality processors. Bose might be passable, but you won't find anyone who knows what they're talking about saying Bose is quality with a straight face. There are nice things you can say about them. Maybe convenient to set up for the average user or something, but not quality speakers.
In short you are correct.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
So what if you're using headphones instead? Some headphones cover the entire ear and allow the sound to be "processed" by the grooves and warps on the outer ear - this may already make up for the missing frequencies. Those earbud-headphones are a completely different thing as they feed the sound right into the ear canal. They are, however, so uncomfortable that I can't see anyone wearing them for periods long enough to damage the hearing.
The point is that in most cases, I don't believe the compression to be harmful to hearing as our environment will provide us the frequencies that we don't get from compressed audio. No-one sits at their computer uninterrupted for days listening to mp3s or playing games and if they do, losing their hearing is not the worst thing that could happen.
So according to this crackpot theory, if we are exposed to less than perfect quality audio, we will begin to lose the ability to hear some things. What about listening to the radio or watching TV with rabbit-ear antennas? Why haven't people started to hear permanent background fuzz from exposure to imperfect AM/FM transmissions or see snow because of bad TV reception?
I agree with some of the posts here regarding the dubious quality of the information in the article. However, I have noticed that my ears can become irritated when listening to mp3 files while I have no problem with most cd or cassette/radio. Why is this? Has anyone else noticed this? I've tried different programs for creating the files as well as different rates without any help. Cassettes are certainly of lower quality with greater noise and distortion than a 256k mp3.
He has spammed several usenet groups with this speculation before and he hardly knows what he is talking about. We have decades of experience on audio compression and as one usenet poster put it, "almost every tv or radio uses some kind of compression for audio (e.g. many radios use mp3). The telephone itself cuts a lot of frequencies (nothing above 8kHz). So, everyone should have a serious damage to the ear, isn't it?"
One thread out of many
This reminds me of the dotcom boom when even the worst business plan could get venture capital. Similarly, this story, no matter how idiotic, is getting attention. It made me feel nostalgic at first, except that the dotcom boom was pro-tech and this one is anti-tech and paranoid to boot.
Quoted (cut and pasted directly):
"Despite I listen to music only quietly, I have repeatedly tinitus"
Hmmm... Perhaps the author has lost more than his audial acuity?
Or is it merely "lossy compression/decompression?"
If you consider black and white a "compression" of color, I guess it's a good thing we didn't "forget" how to see color after all those years of black and white TV.
Good thing we didn't forget how to hear in stereo after all those years of mono AM radio, too.
All of those things simply downsample, while psychoacoustic compresses things that are not audible due to the minds built-in filtering.
What this guy is saying is that that filtering out all the stuff that our brains would filter out will result in a degredation of those filters.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
uazAge wUd bee RewenIng peep's abIlatY tw0 uZZ the LagNguaGGe as WeL aadN yU donut see TAHT! do yU????!!!!!!?????
KFG
i have a bad vision, thus having over -5,0 d lenses and a blurred vision _MUST_ be caused by the image compression. JPGs must be guilty for my vision. further proof?
.pdfs and .bmps as web graphics to prevent young geeks from becoming any blinder... 8)
i didn't have eye glasses before jpgs were invented.
so jsut use uncompressed
oddly enough my left ear have been hurting couple last days and i've noticed about a year earlier that i have hearing problems sometimes when speaking with certain people, i just 'cannot' hear what they speak properly...
and damn i'm only 18! i've been listening mp3s since -97 almost everyday for many hours. Could it be cause of the compression...
Hmm, perhaps i just should go to the doctor and ask whats wrong with my hearing...
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Yeah, I guess I'll go and delete my petabytes of pr0n mpegs, cause they use mp3. Yeah right.
Probably put out by the Record Companies, to try and get people to stop using mp3s.
Like It matters
First of, the paper is poorly written, and slightly defamatory.
(Hey, I don't like the RIAA, anymore than you but it doesn't belong in an informative paper.)
I give it a B mostly becuase it touches briefly on the technicalities associated with hearing.
It sounded more like a proposal that compressed audio is a cause for tinitus, with no direct evidence to back it up...
As a tinitus sufferer myself, I would like to express that there is some sort of increase in hearing loss amoung younger generations, but highly doubt it is related to the mp3 codec.
Moreover it is probably related to higher noise floors generated from work, air conditioning/heating, automobiles, Computers in general are loud, especially an OC'd Athalon 8'). There is more noise in first world contries than there ever was in the world.
Okay, so this guy is a crackpot.
.
However, why hasn't sound quality gone up in the past 20 years? Technology risen to new levels; data storage is much cheeper than it was in 1982 (when Sony & Philips released the CD) . .
but sound quality has become worse, not better.
Aside from SACD and DVD-Audio (which you still can't get a player with digital outputs for the high-def. stuff) of course.
The PMRC declared today that so called "Rap Music" and it's distantly related cousin "Heavy Metal" have been known to have undesirable consequences on certain (if not) all young listeners.
Included adverse side effects are (but not limited to):
Drug induced orgiastic naughtiness
Unclean pagan rituals
Lack of parental respect
Lackluster hygiene
And a complete irreverent attitude towards the right wing status quo.
Won't someone please think about the children?!?
[This, and other, fine bits of off topic nonsense brought to you by the new and improved alcohol fueled UncleRage.]
----
#SickNotWeak
This is yet another stupid crackpot science slashdot article. Quit reading slashdot all you stupid slashdot readers.
FUD & The sky is falling.
this is brian.
OK, lossy compression may cause hearing problems. But wait, there's more! DRM watermarking may cause hearing problems, too. Therefore, we must all buy more (analog) LPs...
Involving his or her own personal experience does NOT qualify as scientific. For a minute there I thought there was going to be some real information but no, it turned out to be another self-important idiot writing up a supposedly scientific study based almost solely on his own experience. I have listened to hundreds of hours of mp3 over the last 4 years and I have never never never had tinnitus. I would advise this schmuck to turn down the stereo, video game, tv , wife, children, Move out of Seoul, get a life.
a degenerative condition that caused almost complete loss of hearing.
I've always liked how the stories here are content tagged by the certain symbols.
Could we get a black pot with an obvious crack along it's side for stories submitted by chrisd?
Paradigm Titans.
Best $200 speakers out there, bar none...
windows 2004 coming soon with new health features!
... uh i mean your .. health
to protect your brain from neuroacoustic degradation, all wma-encoded audio tracks will be replayed with a subliminal message from microsoft for your marketing
There's an English FAQ at http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Logo logie/Logologi.faq.
I dunno, judge for yourself. IMHOYHBT.
Read those words carefully. You really have to try hard to write sentences that badly.
Extemely bad writing on scientific topics is a good tipoff that the writer is a crackpot, crank, pseudoscientist, or other nutjob.
What is this, wacko week on /.? Somebody should get this guy and the author of the UFO book review together, preferably in a padded room. For good measure, throw in the originators of the Nintendo 0wnz Sony piece, and it's a trifecta.
Oh well, at least the piece was grammar- and spelling-compatible with /. ...
I look at this article the same way I look at an obvious troll so eloquent it's been modded funny.
Now that's what I call FUD!
I think that LOUD
MPEG/JPEG compression harms sight.
Keyboards and Mice harm joints.
(my hands hurt just typing this)
Not only does half of this make no real sense (other than to use the biggest words possibly, whether they exist or not), but someone needs a grammar lesson: "Even myself however would by my current knowledge still dare to publish sometime composed music pieces by me on the internet". I certainly don't claim to have perfect grammar, but if someone could explain to me what the heck that sentence means I'd appreciate it. :)
This is a very interesting idea. I don't believe that this person has really done any serious research, however. Or, if s/he has, they lack the skills to present such research in a comprehensible manner. Either way, none of the 'scientific' stuff actually holds water. In doubt of the sense of the paper, I showed it to my roommate, who has a sound recording degree. His response? "This is a pile of crap! Interesting thought, though..."
What a load of bollocks. Not being too technical for anybody here I hope ? So, the brain "fills in the blanks" for compression. And the difference between this and TV is what ? Our brains see the 25 images per second on TV and "interpret" that as movement. This can be seen as image compression, no ? Does this screw up our vision ? Does it my arse.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
There should make a study linking the use of pr0n with inability to engage in relationships in the real world.
Hmm... Just how sure is everybody that this research has nothing to do with RIAA?
Whether he has credentials or not, I personally think he might have a point. It is a well documented fact that distortion is hard on the human ear. When building audio systems for auditoriums, churches, etc it's important to elimiate distortion. MP3 and DRM can introduce distortion into the audio stream.
...
On a personal note, I have noticed that my ears hurt a little more listening to MP3s vs regular CDs. To be fair, it could be the hardware I'm using, but still
According to an article in a local newspaper, CO2 is harmful to plants. When will oxygen harm us?
Because it's about grace. It really is about grace.
OK, before someone else says it, yes hearing aids are exactly like that, so they must be safe... Well, have you ever been next to someone who's wearing headphones and playing some kind of personal hifi (mp3, cassette, cd, radio) loud enough for it to be heard 3 feet away? That's way, way louder than a hearing aid...
My father couldn't hear low frequency sounds, mainly due to the noise inside the tank he was driving around Europe in 1944, and being parked under the gun-line when there was a constant barrage going on.
Uh, has anyone explored the *rest* of his site?
n dex.html
o logie/picts1.html
o logie/Logologi.faq
This is interesting:
"CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)"
And
"I am a cyberage-child - born in the year of Pong"
As a matter of fact, his main page is dedicated to Logologie:
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/e_i
Hmmmm:
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Log
This is the real nail in the coffin, however: http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Log
If we were to take this to it's logical conclusion, our retinal neural networks are being damaged by looking at digitized images. Give me a break. Hey, it's LOUD music that damages your hearing by both breaking the fine hairs in the cochlea and stressing the neurons into poor transmission.
I quote:
...
"But a continuous consumption of datareduced audio could possibly lead to fatal consequences..."
You mean if I use one of those karaoke voice removers from the 70's that I could DIE? (I mean from other than hurled rotten fruit).
And all those tapes I recorded in Dolby B!? I won't live to be 30!!
And the phone!! My god, man, the phone!!! IT IS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!!! Not only do they compress your voice and squirt it down little wires and fibres (and even through the air) but they CHARGE you for the PRIVILEDGE!! Now I KNOW the Illuiminati exist...
And let's not even TALK about the crappy signal to noise ratio of FM radio!!! WE ARE DOOMED!!!!
Interesting digital mind ejaculation he dabbled in without using a single microphone to qualitatively note anything. Those little flapping magnets and paper cone thingies produce ANALOG sound, anways
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
If this were true then does that mean that using the cheap sound chips in all those children's toys (including the 'educational' talking ones) is dangerous to the development of children's brains and auditory perception? This almost makes me want to go trolling a parents' group on Usenet. Imagine Xmas morning if all the talking truckbots and Bleeppads were silenced.
is that you notice how much better high quality cds and DVD-audio discs are. I cannot believe what this guy is saying, simply because this would imply that things suhc as old records, and phonographs, would be "harmful" to our perception of sound. I feel that as humans we are more adaptive than that, and we can go into any situation and adjust fine. Because we can adapt the mp3....then we can adapt to the real thing!
OK, so the hearing loss theory presented here is dubious; and even if we accept the premise, it would seem to require everything that you hear to be lossily compressed in order for this effect to be manifested. But there was one thing I found very useful in this article: Its clear, simple and coherent explanation of just how lossy audio compression works. I hadn't really understood it myself until now.
Might wanna snip that part out and save it to show to the curious, after cleaning up the grammar a bit.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
One wonders, if mp3 compressed audio damages hearing, then does MPEG compression damage vision ? I can finally sue Time Warner for unspecified damages for watching digital TV :)
Having tinnitus since the very early eighties who can i blame?? Must have been the distortion caused by crappy 8 track tapes from the 70's! Yea thats it, beware of the evils of 8 track's! :)
yeah i agree with that ... some of Dj's i knew used to complain about hearing problems...especially after using headphones haha but still it is like a part of everyone's life MUSIC hehe
Just another reason why analog sound production is the only way to go. For you digital freaks, go suck bits. Most of you probably have never heard true analog sound production anyway. So you have no clue what your talking about. For that matter, most of you were still trying to figure out what a diaper was for.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
the nerves in your ear and all the low-level neural processing of sound will fire in response to the gaps, watermarks or subliminal signals in the music stream. It is only the brain that filters these out. But is the brain unaware of the signals?
it's long been known that humans perceive sounds they dont actually hear in the sense that their brain registers it. Ancient church organs have sub sonic and ultra-sonic pipes in them for the purpose of stimulating emotional responses in the audience. It's well known from many pyschological studies that slight , consciously imperceptible, delays introduced into telephone conversation response times causes people to think the person they are talking to is angry.As a kid I could always hear the flyback transformers in TVs and video screen. I could not tell you what the sound sounded like--it was not a high pitch. it was no pitch at all. But I could tell it was present.
The thesis that spectral drop-outs could somehow disrupt neural feedback circuits is an interesting one. Certainly most human made electronic circuits dont handle delta-function responses well: that is the phase lag in any feasible feedback circuit puts an upper limit on the fidelity of the response. Thus the idea that the neural feedback that nulls the unwanted off-pitch sympathetic vibrations in the ear following a loud signal could be disrupted if the waveform was not continous after the loud noise is a valid one. Would this lead to false retraining of the neural net and thus tinitiitus? doubtful. But interesting as an example of an unintended consequence no one thought of before.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/
Just go to the above... The guy is a proponent of "logologie" "religion from the cybertime" (sic). The other article are nice too, like the one about natrium glutamate in cantine food ("nervengift"...). There is nothing to see there, just an Informatik Student in hamburg having fun (heck he isn't even a neurologue !) : Quote : Ich bin ein Kind des Cyberzeitalter, geboren im Jahre des Pong, und ich studiere Softwaretechnik an der Fachhochschule Hamburg (was leider den Großteil meiner Zeit kostet).
I am a child of the Cybertimes, born the same year than Pong, and I study Programming (software technic?) in the Highschool (not university something else) Hamburg (which cost me the biggest aprt of my time).
Move along, ntohing to see here.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
To generalize, the human ear registers the frequencies between 20 and 20,000hz. No matter what theroetically an MP3 could contain as far as "inaudible damage," speakers themselves aren't engeineered to often reproduce sounds that exceeds these thresholds. To do so would be a waste of R&D because the average human would not even hear it. The concept of this (false) argument would work, if the delivery device for an MP3 wasn't a speaker; however, because the delivery device is engineered to reproduce the audible range (ideally) for humans, how then is it somehow malformed into projecting killer sound waves through inaudible means?
Another thing to note: take an equalizer and cut out all treble and all bass; you are then left with just the mids. Does this process leave you deaf? Yes, I'm aware the signal isn't compressed, but the speakers are doing the same thing. Some frequencies are cut out, others aren't. Listen to an MP3 in 96kbs and then in 192kbs, and you will hear the difference. The difference is simply part of the wave is removed, just like in a crossover or equalizer.
hey
"is still unclear whether the consequences of such maladjustments are only temporary (similarly like seeing the world in green/ red discoloured after taking off red/ green 3D glasses) or if the continuous consumption of neuroacoustically datareduced sounds can lead to long lasting or even permanent damage."
just like seeing red/green colours, some sounds can affect the hearing too. i have a fluorscent lamp at home, and it's a bit worn out/damaged so that it once in a while makes a VERY large humming noise (from the thing that converts 220VAC to whatever the tubes needs..don't know what frequency, but it's not very high.. and if i stay in that room (washing room) for more than ten minutes with my head approx 30 cms from the lamp, and then turn on the tap (it's a large metal sink) the sound of the streaming water sounds strange as one should be affected by some drugs.
it's kind a like the sound that one hear in dukenukem3d when duke is in the sewer..
and this altering of the way i hear sounds stays with me for many minutes after i leave the room..
don't know why.. but.. kinda fun
That's an absolutely silly idea. As I sit here with my head phones on, my brain is tryin (very hard) to filter out my room mates video game sound FX. When you listen to music in a car you brain must do a lot of work to filter out road noise. It doesn't matter where you are, there is noise to filter out (unless under "Ideal" conidtions, which rarely occur.).
Not to be a zeolous grammer checker, for I have very bad grammer, but for a person claiming to be educated, the writter has very poor grammar. I couldn't even make sense out of some of his phrases.
- Throbbing Gristle was rumoured to have played around with their harmonics in such a way during one or two shows that their audiences experienced uncontrollable vomiting and presumably a loss of control of other bodily functions (heh).
- A more general overview of "aural warfare" projects that were rumoured to have taken place is available here.
However, I doubt any of this could be achieved with MP3-encoded sound, what with its low fidelity and whatnot...--sdem
Compression technology works on the underlying information in a signal. Lossy compression throws away different information in different circumstances, so even if the preposterous concepts proposed in this article were true, there would be no overarching set of data we were no longer subjected to and so no long term alteration of our perception would be evident.
That said, this article is probably a joke. At least I hope it is.
And you'll have some unintended aural consequences.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
It seems like that this whole thing is a thought experiment, with no actual clinical data so here are a few more thoughts:
1) I was under the impression that mainly, what was removed from files under compression was ideally data about the frequencies that either don't exist in the recorded sound, or that was so quiet or out of the perceptible (at all, at a physical level) range, in which case, there would be no sound in an uncompressed file at the frequencies which are under represented in a compressed file. This would mean that the frequencies removed didn't exist anyway and there would be little/no effect on the final output. I have no idea whether this is true.
2) It seems to me that any mechanically reproduced sound is inherently useless as a calibration mechanism for the obvious reason that it is a sound coming out of speakers rather than say a persons mouth and an orchestra in a pit. Since what we are hearing is not the actual source of a sound, any problems should have become apparent long ago. Besides, even when compression comes into the picture, what's wrong with calibrating our hearing to two/5/6/7 speakers producing a sound that is acoustically unlike any natural sound? Are we assuming that our "finely co-ordinated cybernetic system" can't cope with weird noises. It actually seems like a noise unlike a bear roaring 15 meters behind us and two to the left (instead coming from a combination of rear speakers) would be better for our calibration than one that sounded exactly or almost exactly like it, since the more accurate noise would be more likely to fool our "neuroacoustic" calibration system and thus more likely to do the damage that it took Pete Townshend several explosions and 100 watt Marshalls to achieve. If instead the signal was different enough that we could at least subconsciously process it as a rear speaker and not an actual bear, our system should do fine.
Just some thoughts.
This is some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Right up there with tinfoil hats and slipstream chemicals.
Say Stewey- Aren't you the young fella who just started using Mandrake a couple months ago? Wow- a purist already. Twat.
and quotes always go outside of punctiuation, and Google and Yahoo are not verbs, and proper nouns are to be capitalized, and this is a RUN-ON SENTENCE!
First, I'd like to say that the guy should ease up on playing the stairway to heaven too loud, that should help him with his tinnitis.
As for this whole mp3 data compression business permenantly damaging our ears, I just hope that he's wrong. I don't see any evidence that supports his claim, if their is, please tell me.
Otherwise, I'm gonna continue listening to Julio Iglesias - Agua Dulce Agua Sala.mp3 on repeat. Ok, there are other songs I listen to also, but this one kicks ass. I also recommend Julio Iglesias - La Carretera.
Ok, I'm getting off topic here. I don't see any reason to believe anything this guy says. We don't know what his credentials are and there is no other information that I know of that corroborates what he's saying.
This is increadibly irresponsible of /. to leave this crap on the front page. Some guy puts some drawings of the human ear on a page with a few big words and all of a sudden it's freakin' scientific? No references, no data, nothing but trying to create FUD and crud!
Please add an update questioning the validity of this article.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Before you think, "Oh no! My ears ring, maybe it's because of all those MP3/Oggs, video games, and my dvd player," consider what effects caffeine might be having on your system. "Large" amounts of caffeine have been known to cause ringing in the ears (among other things). It's probably pretty safe to say that on average, geeks and slashdotters tend to consume a lot of caffeine. Christian Oliver has some interesting ideas, but perhaps his concerns are unwarranted.
-- It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
maybe there was some smartass working for riaa or warnermusic or something that thought he could scare a few from downloading mp3 music?
Well, OK, I'll admit, it was an interesting read for me (an ex biologist / scientist). But for the masses, you can either RTFA, or the following summary:
MP3's and other lossy compression (loss of quality through compression) methods change the distribution of frequencies along the sound spectrum, and maybe, just maybe, because nobody has proven otherwise, it might be the case that this can possibly have permanent effects on one's hearing. Maybe. Possibly. We dont really know. Neither do you. Or so we might think. Maybe. Oh yeah - here are a bunch of pictures from a biology textbook that look really cool, but are only connected to our speculation in a weak tangential unscientific way. Maybe.
. I haven't heard so many maybe's and 'might be the case' equivalents since the last 'In Search Of' marathon. And the article didn't even have Spock. .
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
hahahaha! SOVIET RUSSIA! get it? it's funny!
I don't think listening to MP3s or other types of "compressed" music will do any permanent damage to be worried about it. After all, if the brain can adapt to listening to something that's been cleaned of imperceptible "noises", then it can simply re-adapt when the source has not been compressed. All you would need is to talk to someone (face to face) to receive the necesary stimulus.
If this problem was something permanent, we would have already found cases, since MIDI music ahould cause a similar effect (especially a few years ago, when most sound cards used FM synth).
It will be a while before he actually checks back.
I read the German original, it is written in academic language and perfect grammar. I don't think it's a hoax, just wild speculation that happens to lead to wrong conclusions.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Does this mean that in order to stave off impending deafness, I'll have to start listening to non-computer-generated sounds? Like I'll actually have to talk to living human beings, go camping and listen to the sounds of nature, or go to clubs where there's live music? You mean I'll have to get a life?
Ah, screw it. It's not worth it. Now what directory were those Pink Floyd MP3s in again...?
Since people can sue McDonalds because they say that their food made them fat, I am not going to sue Windows because their media player has allowed me to listen to all this music that is damaging to my ears.
Try an extreem example for yourself some time. Walk around with headphones on playing only a single tone and see what it does to your hearing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That guys eems like a pretty creative person. Maybe his ideas are bunk, but further research could reveal them to be true as well. Either way, something is learned.
That's how science works. Someone comes up with a crazy idea, the idea is tested, and the results illuminate the world for us.
It's a lot easier to be critical of an idea than it is to create a truly original idea. These days, every meathead in cyberspace is an amature debunker.
No but he suffers from pinkeye.
Why isn't this true for CD-quality sound, which is a distorted, some would say degraded, attempt to mimic analog sound. Or why isn't this true for recorded music generally, which generally sounds substantially different from the same thing performed live? The biggest problem I have with his thesis is the assumption that there is an "original" or "natural" sound that we should be calibrating our ears to in the first place. What is the "right" or "natural" way to really listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"??
Who IS this guy? This has to be one of the worst written things I've seen in a long time. I don't pretend to have perfect grammer but PLEASE!
"From the view of neuronomy it is therefore to classify, although not as acutely dangerous, at least as very precarious that a wider and wider spreading audio transmission technology for data reduction just systematically removes those spectral sound portions at the auditory threshold, on those normally the hearing processor fields of our brain decide whether they shall be perceived or filtered out, because so the signal for their self calibration is missing, whereby at longer term a maladjustment of the hearing processor fields can threaten."
Did anyone else read this sentence(and yes, it is painfully ONE sentence) and think 'why am I still reading this drivel?' I'll wait to worry about my mp3's when this gets edited and published in something reputable.
i did my honors thesis in cognitive neuroscience on audition, and this paper reads like a 10th grade copy-crap-out-of-the-encyclopedia jibberish. he has no actual FACTS to back any of his claims up. but, hey, he's got neato color pictures of the cochlea, so it must be true.
So let me get this straight. It is wrong, evil, BAAAAD, to make copies.
The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
What?
Because standing waves are not sharply focussed at one spot but always also slightly excite membrane zones nearby, and because after a loud noise after- vibrations (resounds) persist on the membrane for a short duration, the hearing processor fields of the brain contain very finely co-ordinated compensation circuits
By the time the sound reaches your ears, whether it's an MP3 or a live band, there will be plenty of that imperceivable resonance in the sound as it bounces around your room and inside your eardrum.
After 20+ years of standing in front of the main stacks, I cant't understand what the author is talking about. ;->
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This guys thesis is good, no doubt about that. But there is one point I feel he missed.
He says that our brains use the undistinguishable sounds to calibrate our hearing and that these frequencies are lost in Mp3 or Ogg enocoding.
Is there not sounds from anything else besidees TV, radio and computers. Could our brains not calibrate our hearing from the sound of our car starting... or the wind blowing... or the sound of a Canada Goose?
What happened to our hearing when we didn't have technology? It was fine then.
It would have been nice to see this slight point accounted for before the writer made the "jump" from Mp3 = Hearing Loss.
4B4556494E
Look above ...
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
Last night. I use big over-the-ear headphones in a quiet room.
I was going to say the same thing. Glad someone beat me to it.
Also, Q: wouldn't there necessarily be a dynamic "smearing" in the D/A, AMP, and driver stages? Especially with cheap gear? Wouldn't the kind of cover over dynamic "holes" in the signal?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
sponsored by the RIAA?
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
"Minnie Mouse is Mickey's fiancee."
"We mustn't overdo it."
"No, we must overdo it. If we admit that in the whole universe there is even a single fact that does not reveal a mystery, then we violate hermetic thought."
"That's true. Minnie's in. And, if you'll allow me, I'll add a fundamental axiom: The Templars have something to do with everything."
"That goes without saying," Diotallevi agreed.
- Umberto Eco
Clearly, the author of this enlightening treatise of biological science is a brilliant scientist, ahead of his time, worthy of publishing by the Manutius press.
*smirk*
Soviet Sad Man is sad the first posts you
But now we know... What you don't hear *can* hurt you!
Follow the links. Google the unfamiliar buzz words. This is some kind of entertainment.
This gentleman presents an interesting hypothesis but provides no evidence, research or testing. And I become very suspicious when I see a "scientific" document laid out like this.
Reading through this document I found (1) background information on lossy acoustic compression, (2) brief biology lesson on the inner workings of the ear, and (3) a couple paragraphs beneath the diagrams that nicely explains why this lossy compression works.
Then there's a big jump:
There's no why presented. His claim is (read it yourself): because frequencies from the original signal are being removed, the ear has calibration trouble and this causes hearing damage.
He could have stated that in one sentence. I'm suspicious because there is a lot of background info used to pad a claim without evidence, and I think it's a trick. That background information is not research or evidence. There is no research or evidence here.
I think this guy's concern is for religious reasons (see his web page) that we are all going to be affected by tainted audio in all sorts of digital broadcasts, while he prefers uncompressed signals.
Here is (good?) news: whenever audio passes through any transmission channel it is permanently modified. Standard digitization itself is very damaging, and the process involves much filtering and adulteration of original frequencies.
My daughter has a moderate hearing loss (congenital, discovered when she was 3 1/2 years old). I have spent many hours discussing the nature and cause of hearing loss with physicians and audiologists. From every thing I've been told and have read, the only known basis of hearing loss caused by sound is related to the total energy in the sound signal entering the ear. That is to say that a high-energy signal will cause nerve damage that can result in possible long term hearing loss. To believe that the "type" or waveform could be the basis of hearing loss and no one has figured this out but some flunky on an obscure German site that contains no real background -- just this dumbassed "thought experiment" -- is just plain silly. I say, prove it or lose it.
LINUX RULES!!!
AM radio has severe limitations in dynamic range
and distortion from atmosphereic disruptions. My parents listened to AM radio for decades, and continue to. Is this why my parents (Who are in their 70's) can't hear anymore?
I think the RIAA should protest against AM radio! That bump music that Rush, G. Gordon and Hannity play is hurting my hearing!
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
Unlike this jerk, I've actually read a few books on digital signal processing. He's wrong, and is just ranting based on a soft-focus popular misunderstanding of how MP3 works. MP3 doesn't remove any frequencies from the signal - it just represents some frequency bands with less resolution than others. If you've heard 16-bit and 8-bit WAV files, then you know what I mean by resolution.
An MP3 encoder begins by separating the input signal into octave bands, rather like a graphic equalizer does. Psychoacoustic algorithms determine which of these bands need to be kept in high resolution so that the audio will sound reasonably good, and which bands can safely be represented more crudely.
So no sounds are removed! Some are represented with less detail about amplitude and phase - perhaps they're a little bit louder or a little bit softer than they should be, or a little bit out of phase with the real thing - but they're still there! Instead of thinking of it this way, you could also consider them a bit "noisier" than they otherwise would be, if you call the difference between the result and the original "noise". It's all math anyway. You couldn't remove them entirely even if you wanted to - the filter bands are an entire octave each - and filtering out an entire octave band will color the audio to a significant degree. It would sound just like shoving a random equalizer band all the way down - you'd hear it, and it would not be suitable for music reproduction.
Okay, I'll forgive the bad english, but not the bad science. His hypothesis (untested in any way) does not even have anecdotal support, except his own feeling that MP3s aggravate his tinnitis even at low volume levels.
I hate to break it to him, but analog music playback is more "lossy" than digital music playback. If missing audio information caused medical problems or loss of hearing acuity, we should have people who still use cassette tapes for their music coming to see their audiologists.
finally, look at the bottom of the page. The guy is a quack. He teaches a new cyber-religion to anyone gullible enough to swallow his crap.
Get a life, people.
Warren P
Toronto
It's like this: the ear is able to pull a lot of information out of natural, acoustic sound. There's regular features to such sounds that are distinctly different from plain random noise. The ear can dig into the random noise very deeply to get information out.
What these guys are saying is this: with certain types of distortion, the noise becomes opaque, the information just ain't there when the ear tries to dig for it. Soon it stops trying- or just gets out of practice. It atrophies.
There are a few points that are established (some recently) to support this, though the whole chain of evidence isn't there, and in fact it's a bit alarmist.
(1) Ears do adjust. If your hearing isn't symmetrical, your brain WILL construct a coherent picture from the sound field, despite the ear inputs not matching.
(2) Digital noise floors are NOT the same as natural white noise.
That last helps to support these wilder theories, but nobody that I know of had tested it until recently. I got in an argument on Usenet where I had to establish this. The argument was that dithering and truncation produced a noise floor different from the same signal with exactly equivalent white noise overlaid onto it. Basically, that quantization can be heard as a distinct character to the noise floor.
I had people very huffy about me even arguing this, because their digital audio theory demanded that dithered digital was perfect in every respect, and specifically that it behaved the same as analog noise w.r.t. detail retrieval beneath the noise floor.
I was given matching files- one being signal plus random-amplitude noise, and one being the same thing but quantized to the level of the noise, resulting in a normal TPDF noise floor, entirely uncorrelated. There was a 2 bit and a 4 bit example for me to try, because I was arguing that this difference was obvious at coarse levels, not that I could consistently hear it at 16 bits or something.
I did a computer ABX double-blind test, using both the examples, and got 40 out of 40 trials correct, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that these types of noise DO sound different. It's not even subject to debate anymore- that's what ABX is for- not asserting a negative but proving a positive beyond serious doubt. Dithered noise floors measure a lot like broad-band noise, and they may be uncorrelated, but they are absolutely not the same as simple random-amplitude noise (like you use for the dither signal prior to quantization).
I'm not aware of anyone doing this test before, but now it's been done and the point proved.
I am inclined to agree with the lunatic fringe here that it's the results of these very 'unnatural' processes which cause problems- they damage musical enjoyment, and they're part of why modern music is so commodified and worthless. The only serious mass media formats are prone to these problems. As a result, mass media itself seems less important- a self-destroying process. The sound alone contributes to a lessening of interest.
That said- anyone who had their hearing actually damaged by this effect would have to either live in an anechoic chamber or wear Walkman headphones every waking moment. The world is FULL of acoustic sounds- hell, traffic alone is an acoustic sound quite capable of 'recalibrating' the ear, and any face-to-face human contact often involves sound, which also 'recalibrates' the ear. So the alarmism is entirely foolish. Maybe Mark Levinson lives in an environment entirely free of any outside sound, I don't know :)
No, in Soviet Russia, people try to get the LAST post before the story's archived.
Well obviously the writer never ripped a cd to mp3: "...this way audio recordings can be reduced to less than 1/20 of their initial data amount without a noticeable loss of much quality." OK, let's see, I'll rip "depeche mode - strangelove" with cdparanoia. I got .wav file of 52379084 bytes. Then we encode that with lame-3.93-mmx with standard (reproducable) switches (--r3mix) and end up with mp3 that is compressed 6.5 times (according to lame), 6347467 bytes.
Play that up in stereo, and you can hear the difference, maybe not in frequencies, but definitely in dynamics and stereo picture.
So how can I compress that 20 times without hearing the difference? I gotta have that CODEC!
...due to the fact that most people work inside in office environments, humans are sure to soon lose their ability to percieve depth at a distance. Also at risk is the human ability to tolerate absolute silence or darkness (both mostly eliminated in our modern workplace and dwellings). The ability of humans to withstand pain is vanishing, and allergies are being introduced, due to cleaner environments in our youth. Oh, and electronic calculators are eliminating the human ability to do mathematics.
In conclusion, the world is going to end in five...four...three...two...one...damn. Well, maybe tomorrow...
May we never see th
You should all know by now that the RIAA funded this research project to attract hypochondriacs and the paranoid into buying CDs rather than downloading MP3s!
"You forgot to mention s*x! "
...
How the hell do sox kill you? And don't try and say by their smell
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Obviously there's a need for a TotalSlashdot option, which lets people see all the submitted links, and not just those the moderator(s) chose.
This works well on Fark, with one side effect: the quality of the 'free' links has been degrading ever since TotalFark came about.
But, people on the TotalFark side have a field day with 700+ daily links.
Use crappy headphones or speakers and you're guaranteed to get lots of that precious extra noice...
It seems to affect grammar, too.
"Hey, you know, cars run on gasoline, and my house is made of wood, so everyone better stop driving cars so the termites will stop eating my house!"
Soviet Sad Man is sad it's funny.
if mp3 is modelled around human hearing, no wonder my dog isn't enjoying my tina turner collection.
perhaps I'll use to dog vorbis in future
"loss of acuity may occur becauseself calibration becomes impossible".
Well, the ear is pretty resistant to things about low level background (wind) noise causing these problems. Ot noice from a compact cassette for that matter.
I think the author doesn't like technology and modern music - what's the 'infotrash' he's talking about?
Thomas
The author suspects that since neural thresholds are continously calibrated they could be affected by prolonged exposure to sounds with significant energy just below the masking threshold. This is a valid theory that definitely merits further research.
The author's claim that his tinnitus condition results from this is as flawed as the claims of most pseudoscientific texts that rely on anecdotal evidence instead of statistical research. Mentioning "subliminal messages" and "overpriced CDs" further reduces the credibility of this article.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Knowing you have misinformed (b..s..ed) a whole generation of slashdotters?
So, the RIAA paid for this article to be posted on Slashdot, yes or no?
How about the quality of the screens that we look at every day?
Or, more so, the processed food we eat that tastes like the real thing but isn't?
and this fad called cooking foods.
and this anti nature movement called roofs.
and this mess called clothes.
and..
It would still be in PCM format, which is in a sense compressed.
Also, the well regarded audiophile Mark Levinson happens to claim the same thing about the PCM format - it's an hazard!
I think you'll find alot about Levinsons point of view on the subject doing a google.
That said I believe this article and Levinsons ideas are nothing but a marketing ploy to undermine DVD-audio in favour to SACD, it smells too fishy for me.
Sounds like he has a hypothisis, now if he applies the scientific model, constructs some proper, double blind experiments to prove it, while removing interfering factors, it might grow up to be a theroy.
Till then I'll continue listening to MP3s.
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
All kinds of music recordings are compressed. When the CD appeared, people complained that the sound was improperly encoded, and that quality was lost over vinyl. CD's use compressed music too. People in the music industry (and who use Digital Audio Tapes in studios) can actually tell the difference between DAT and CD... So we'd be deaf because of CD's too.
Plus, when I listen to MP3's (computer plugged to hi-fi speakers) the sound echoes everywhere, produce some vibrations on wooden furniture... I guess this produces just enough "real", distorted signals for my ear to "recalibrate"?
What IS making me deaf, indeed, is the stupid 12-cm fan in the stupid Powermacintosh G4...
When listening to "compressed music" changes our brain in some way? I don't want to know how our brain has changed after introducing music at all. Why do some people like punk music (2 or 3-chords) while other people listen to classic music? That's Your personal taste.
And if You like a sort of music in a way, Your brain will change to extend Your taste according to the music type You listen to usually. Because what You _know best_, You will like. Why are all these old songs being covered all the time? Because it's the cheap reaction of our brain!
There is no big deal about the brain when it is changing. It's a complex thing and when it changes it develops. This is why we live, because our brain is so complex. Every single impression will have consequences on Your brain, so stop crying about it!
The whole theory in this article is a bunch of crap, because if Your brain would not change, it would mean that Your are DEAD!
And since when have changes on Your brain implied consequences on the development process of Your children? Does it mean mentally sick people will get mentally sick children? Grow up people. When the brain develops, it does not mean the same as evolution.
Check out his "biography."
He's a "cyberyogi," a teacher of "logology." Uh.. yeah. From his site:
Logologie is a religion of reason; it is free of devilization and has many things common with Buddhism, but unlike this it includes a much more detailed understanding of the physical interaction between consciousness and the nervous system. Main goal of Logologie is the preservation and development of the human race by enabling it to sovereignous- holistical thinking and the overcoming of causing sufferance, because due to the network of cosmic consciousness everything is connected with everything and sufferance therefore never exists separately.
I am a cyberage-child - born in the year of Pong, and I study software- techniques at the German technical college Fachhochschule Hamburg (which unfortunately consumes the major amount of my time).
I am researcher of neuronomy and consciousness physics. (Neuronomy is the science of the improvement of the usage of brain and nervous system.) I collect historical videogames and homecomputers, I enjoy to build and repair electronic things and I am interested in electronic musics, synthesizer technology and everything that makes unusual (mostly electronic) sounds. I also compose own musics (e.g. like tekkno- trance, meditational musics etc.) and like to write poems and short stories etc. (e.g. SF), paint computer graphics and I am generally very interested in art and philosophy.
Uh.. yeah. Sounds credible to me.
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
Low level tinnitus? i thought that was just my PC fans...
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
God damn local death metal bands.
Whenever I've been to one of those concerts I have tinnitus for two days afterwards, their guitar amps and drum kits must have embedded lossy compression software.
Six sick
... traffic accidents increased 10 fold over the last few years eversince CD burners got cheaper and utilities such as Kazaa, Napster, Grokster, Gnutella etc. became available.
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
This reads like a rather clever troll to me. Especially given the "color pink" bit he also did.
is the bass enhanced "equalization" of Radio DJ's and Monster Truck Rally ad voice-over artists.
I really tried to resist, but in the end, my evil side won. Sorry about that.
Money for nothing, pix for free
One would think that someone with so much surplus time as to research this subject would have a better command of the English language. Of even just a friend who did.
You might also want to check out this guy's homepage.
Be very careful about where your medical advice is coming from - a lot of people want to be doctors, but not so many are willing to go through medical school and an internship.
And I though hippies were an extinct species...
first of all, did anyone else have a really hard time reading this thing? i think the authors need to a better job of translating. (maybe they should do a study of how bad grammar can hamper the publication of research!!) :p
second, as i've said before, studies are bullshit. you can produce a study to prove literally anything (ever hear the one about cadillac owners being more likely to have heart attacks?)
third, as had already been said in this thread, the way i listen to music makes it more likley that good, old-fashioned volume will kill my hearign long before badly-encoded MP3s. especially since 90% of my listening these days is done on a huge, full-ear headset.
Speculation without any scientific support. I can think of more interesting things to speculate about if lack of evidence is no problem.
He appears to think that looking at the colour pink can be dangerous too.
That's the funniest thing I've heard in days. Granted, it's been a tough week...
That is quite possibly the longest single sentence I have ever read.
I took Cheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun", extracted it into a WAV file on my PC, converted it to a 160kbps MP3, and saved it. Then I used Audacity to load both up. I inverted the MP3 version, and mixed it with the WAV version. In effect, I subtracted the MP3 from the WAV file.
What was the result? When I played back the resulting mix, all I heard was a loud, rumbling hiss, something like white or pink noise with more at the low frequencies. I also heard the occasional syllable from Cheryl's background singers.
I don't know about anyone else, but I kinda like not having that noise in there.
c'mon slashdot, we're getting a little loose with
our definitions here, aren't we?
where's the experiments? the simulations? the
theoretical predictions of exactly what ear stresses there are?
spectualion maybe, hypothesis perhaps, but this
is certainly no science.
I couldn't finish this article. The English was so bad I had to reconstruct each sentence.
The whole challenge of decoding sensory input is not so much in trying to sense every little variation in the environment, but more in finding meaningful patterns in the input. The way the brain processes information is inherently lossy anyway. For example, the brain does not store the direct input from your retina. There is no bitmap of RGB values of every image that you've ever laid eyes on. What remains in the brain are only the connections to other processing centers, such as the limbic system which controls emotion or the parietal lobes which guide spatial perception, which get reinforced every time a similar input presents itself. And it seems that all the senses work this way.
If anything, the way codecs emphasize a pattern (e.g., a song) helps reinforce the particular tracts in the neural wiring that recognize this pattern. In fact, in the article, it is even pointed out that the whole reason the feedback tracts (i.e., the efferent fibers that run back to the cochlea) exist is precisely to dampen out unwanted input, so that the desired sensory pattern can be better recognized. (Hence, e.g., the ability to hear a conversation 10 feet away despite being in a roaring crowd at a stadium)
And in any case, hearing did not evolve for us to be able to enjoy music. Compared to other species, our auditory acuity generally sucks, and these limitations are hardwired into our genetics. Instead, in a sense, music evolved precisely because of the way we hear. Our brains are good at finding patterns in seemingly random streams of information and listening to music, which is definitely less random than ambient environmental noise even out in the wilderness of precivilization, may very well continually reinforce this ability. In other words, input that is simpler than what naturally occurs in reality reinforce tracts in our brain that help us pick out the same inputs in challenging, distracting environments.
Phexro spankith:
/enjoy/. Changing to 192 encoding may sound fine for now, but your brain is a persistent beast and will figure it out sooner or later.
> I remember when I first started encoding my CDs, I couldn't tell the difference between 128kb CBR MP3s and the CD source.
Actually Phexro, this does not mean your hearing has gotten better, but that it has gotten WORSE.
Your hearing use to be so well tuned that it could compensate for irregularities in 128 encoding, preventing your brain from ever perceiving them. However, now that you've grown accustomed to listening to MP3 audio, your brain's hearing has lost the ability to fill in the gaps as well, because it doesn't remember how.
Rather, your brain is doing its job by noticing the gaps in the signal, and figures this is for a purpose, and turns those gaps into noise for you to
AgV
Did anyone else notice the glaring change of quality in the English in the last two paragraphs? It seems to me that the author, who is apparently German, copied most of the article, and then added his own paranoid rant at the end. Although this is an interesting idea, the author offers no proof for any of his conclusions.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
I'd say this might, might, might be a problem is all you listened to on a daily basis were MP3s and their lossy compression. But it's not. Most people I know of take their headphones off one in a while and are forced to listen to the real world full of it's real with it's complete lack of audio compression. In fact, I'd be willing to bet the human ear recieves more than enough of this on a daily basis to negate any imagined long term effects listening to MP3s might create.
Frankly, this sounds like some study the RIAA might fund.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
It appears that the author of this presentation has read a bit on cochlear function, but the premise of his argument is purely speculative, offering nothing of scientific value.
Immediately, my skepticism made me think, your eye and brain make similar tuning adjustments, so why has nobody made this argument against the CRT? The fact that is missing here, is that the ear and eye and all sensory systems of the human nervous system make tuning adjustments continuously, in real-time, and have proven themselves time and time again to be remarkably plastic and resiliant.
Perhaps if you grew a person inside a box where only audio that suffered lossy compression was avaiable, you'd get a person who can't process the generally unnoticeable differences (note: unnoticeable != impercievable).
This is analogous to persons who attempt to learn foriegn languages beyond early childhood for which there is limited overlap in sounds relative to the native language of the speaker. The end result is, certain sounds are simply not processed correctly.
The problem I see with the author's premise is that proliferation of lossy compression schemes will result in this type of immersion, only it fails to indicate that *any* sound a person hears that is not compressed is still processed by the ear and brain. I doubt that a child who has listened only to MP3 music wouldn't be able to tell the difference when first introduced to live music.
Of course, I offer no scientific proof to refute this article that offers no scientific proof.
We could just have our mp3 players to add random sounds that will be eliminated by the cochlea and their compensation circuits. This way, this part of the internal ear would still be trained and would not degrade.
Utter and complete drivel! Should have been posted under the heading of 'religion garbage'!
Cezar
I'm aware most people don't have this problem, but I could add a little to this discussion. I, myself, can't understand the images on a TV set if I'm not aligned to it. In other words, if I'm upside-down or tilted to one side, I have a very difficult time distinguishing images, and can't recognize famous people (although I can recognize cartoons). The same happens when I tilt the TV (I did this for an experience).
This is of course just a little annoying, but curious. It also seems to be linked to the loss of 3D perspective, since I don't have this problem while seeing the real world. What intrigues me most is that I really can't distinguish what happens in the screen. To make a poor analogy, it's like someone is mumbling instead of talking.
My neighbor's
Interesting that this should be posted just after ZDNet put out this article.
y /0,10 738,2902207,00.html
"Why Uncle Sam might buy you a TV"
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/stor
It explains that the FCC wants to provide a government grant in the form of a $500 rebate for customers who purchase digital televisions. This is in an effort to encourage television networks who still own rights to analog frequencies (eg, channel 2-60 some) to stop using these channels because the FCC already auctioned them off to digital providers for $16 billion (when they become available).
So the government feels that Digital Television is safe for us? I'm satisfied.
AgV
My last hearing test showed that the hearing in my right ear had not deteriorated at an unusual rate and had not deteriorated faster than my left ear.
So, although this is only one case, I suspect that this paper is nto going to lead very far.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
We don't take a straight signal in and record it like a video camera. We run it through a biological convolution function that generates a holographic signal. That is what allows our eyes to subtract out the blood vessels on top of our retina. That is also what allows our ears to subtract out background noise from a room to hear a conversation.
Next they will be telling us that movie makers not painting the back of sets will cause macular degeneration!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Lossy compression has been around for ever in the form of radio which doesn't broadcast the full spectrum of sound of the original. And any digital media whether lossy or "lossless" doesn't capture the full spectrum of the original media. The act of sampling itself causes some data loss however high the sampling rate. So the researcher should have plenty of historical data, but unfortunately doesn't use any of them.
Very dramatic statement to make though. Catches people's attention.
So, which is more likely to kill you: the sound of a whining kid... or an MP3 of a whining kid?
A lot of TV shows are shot using a video technique where they seem to shoot slower but display faster to make up the difference. I don't really know why, and really what. But I know that I'm sensitive to it and often kinda "see" that frames are missing. When I can see it, it's uncomfortable. So...will I go blind? Will my brain be ruined?
Double-whammy; what if you watch a TV show which does video like this and has MP3 audio? I bet my head would literally explode.
Yes, senator, I'd like to point out that MP3s not only threaten to make me^H^H artists dirt poor, but new research indicates that MP3s are actually born of alien technology planted on Earth as a pre-invasion measure to destroy all the Earth's population reducing the human race to mindless zombies. Once the aliens arrive we'll all be put into slave labor, and possibly eaten alive, unless MP3s are stopped!
Everyone should take back there DVD players and cancel there Satilite TV subscriptions as watching MPEG2 video will distroy your eye site and cause you to see artifacts in normal everyday life....
But on a serious note... we have all been using telephones for years and the sound quality and distortion on that is way worse then any digital music I have... Of course I realize part of the arguement is the fact that it is so close to perfect that makes it so bad but it all seams very speculative.
he claims to be the "Teachmaster" of Logologie - the first cyberage- religion.
His other article on "health information" is titled: Warning: Pink can be dangerous for health!.
Well then, I think we can safely say that this individual is not exactly a "conventional" thinker. In my limited experience with such matters I would say he seems to have the hallmarks of schizophrenic thinking. But one way or the other, this is pretty damn far from scientific research. I wish articles like this would actually get read before they're posted.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Geeks and goofs like this guy spread misconceptions and that's how myths are created.
So what if mp3's and HDTV signals are missing some "natural" frequencies from the real world. What percentage of our lives do we spend listening to these signals? I would take this article seriously if people wore soundproof boxes around there heads 100% of the time, and these artificial signals were pumped into their ears constantly. This is not the case, so I have a hard time taking research like this seriously.
Someone should check this guy's funding - I would bet it's from the RIAA!
bullshit. unadulterated, nonscientific bullshit.
Thankyouthankyou, i'll be here all evening.
vk.
I might be able to believe this, but the author keeps setting of my bullshit sensor with phrases like, "The human hearing is an extremely finely co-ordinated cybernetic system". Cyhbernetic, not my hearing. Mine's all biological.
PCM is not compressed, either in fact, or "in a sense".
Okay, kids, gather round. Today's lesson is on the anatomy of a URL.
So the first thing that tipped me off was a reference to "White science." So I scooted back a few subdirectories to find that this "study" is hosted on a website about a cyber-religion. Interesting. The pages were in German, and I didn't really feel like running it through a translator, but I found a link to an FAQ in English Which you might find interesting. I know the editors here can't thoroughly research every story, but it took me all of three minutes to severely damage the credibility of this "study". Use a bit of common sense and check out the more sensational stories, guys.
You forgot about quantization and truncation(error).
I notice people here saying that they could tell when a TV was on because of the high pitch sound as a kid... well, I can still hear it perfectly well as an adult. From my monitor as well. I know it drives me nuts but I've mostly learned to tune it out.
Meh.
PCM, like all digital sampling, compresses the data from a temporal perspective. The common audio sampling rate of 44.1 kHz takes a sample every 1/44100th of a second as the name would suggest. The 'spaces' between the samples are lost on the encoding end and reconstructed by filters after D/A conversion on the decoding end.
if the guy was being paid by the RIAA to make such a claim.
I'd believe it then.
Just like I believe that Marijuana makes you go insane.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Sometimes, especially in spring, when I walk around in the woods and watch brown and yellow leafs, sometimes some colors feel strange, like an itching inside my brain. Once I stared for several minutes into some square meters of ground covered with yellow leafs reflecting the direct light of the sun. I was happy and excited just by looking at this color, which in fact was not like any yellow I have seen before in my life. It seemed to be yellow, orange, brown and green at the same time. The sensation felt great, and I after a while looking at it I was sure this color could never be reproduced on an RGB display. Sometimes I also feel slightly disoriented when bathed in red or blue light from flourescent lamps, which are placed by artists in some public places here, and I like this sensation of brain-tickling so I often to walk through there just to get this strange feeling.
Regarding MP3, when I started to listen to 128kbit MP3, I was hardly able to recognize a difference. Later I became very sensitive to the artfacts of MP3-compression and almost stopped to listen to 128kBit MP3 for some types of music, especially Madonna and The Beatles sound really bad to me when compressed at 128kbit. I could not hear artifacts with 128 kBit OggVorbis Compression, but I am curious whether I will after a while. Also this effect of feeling bad while listening to an MP3 Versions seems to happen with music I heard very often ucompressed before.
The article does not give any answers, but it raises some really important questions. However, I am afraid they will never be answered, because after more than fifty years of television the consequences are still not understood very well.
p.
yellow-brown-orange
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
this is the most unscientific thing i have read...what a bunch of crap! i would bet, the author of this works for the RIAA trying to badmouth MP3s...here's a news flash for you: CDs are compress from theyre mastered studio versions at 24bit@96Khz...gee, will CDs cause tinutus?
you can get profound hearing loss from playing music loud all the time, or sudden very loud events, or even you diet IE. caffine, or sugar...maybe the moral of this story oughta be, "i have hearing loss, i should go get checked for diabetes"
I do work in sound compression and I find that with music I know and love, I can ALWAYS find some bit of it where the compressed version is missing something. Even Ogg at it's lowest possible compress "-m500" doesn't sound quite as good as the original.
That's the reason to listen to the original. Because you will enjoy it more.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Seriously, I believe that if you get some level of exposure to normal sounds, the long-term adaptive feedback processes in your inner-ears should work for you, not against you -- even if you listen to mp3s.
I am not so sure about the safety on listening WMAs, though... ;-)
-- Imperial units must die --
the internet makes people think they can say anything. and /. is full of people who think they are right and the world is wrong. linux is not "better" than windows for today's definition of computing. Have you had a tour of Bose? they can build auditoriums where microphones aren't needed that seat thousands of people. /. won't like this because it's a company that makes money providing good services.
At the end of the article this guy goes on a bit about how he supports the use of MP3 and related formats, etc etc. He makes it clear that he is no fan of the RIAA. It seems to me that all he's saying is "This might be a problem, maybe we should look into it some more."
The way the brain processes information is inherently lossy anyway.
It is not so much what the brain does, but the mis-callibration of the dampening mechanisms that happen *before* brain processing that is the concern being expressed.
In other words, input that is simpler than what naturally occurs in reality reinforce tracts in our brain that help us pick out the same inputs in challenging, distracting environments.
I don't know. Generally training that is *harder* than reality is a better skill builder than easier/simpler. Worf did not battle bunny rabbits on the holedek.
Table-ized A.I.
when your roomate bursts out in laughter 3 feet away from you while reading his email.
Now who's reading his email?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
THE RIAA and MPAA?
On tap for 2003 the RIAA and MPAA convince the Surgeon General that all MP3 files and mpg files must have the following warning:
The Surgeon General has determined that listening to MP3 Files or watching MPG files is hazardous to your health.
On a study sponsored by the MPAA, scientist have found that watching movies on your computer screen will cause serious damage to your eyeglobes. This holds even more true if the movies are your legally bought DVD discs under a non-M$ operating system, or some divx copy downloaded from your favorite p2p network. The latter could make your eyes bleed.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
"Effecting" hearing would be great, and might help millions who suffer from deafness. Affecting hearing would not be as good.
Just like masturbation makes you deaf...
I'm not going to flame here because it sounds like the author means well, OTOH, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. This one frankly belongs on the same list as UFO coverups and Flouride Conspiracies. He doesn't indicate any in-depth knowledge of what he's writing about, just the kind of layman-level understanding psychosomatics get when they scare themselves silly reading anatomy texts.
:-) Volume can certainly damage.
Perhaps our author really is state-of-the-art, but I see nothing in his article to indicate that. Everything cited can be found in beginner's texts on the subject. Nor is anything cited particularly relevant to his conclusions.
Let's not forget that the CD itself is a 'data reduced' sampling of a real world signal, at best an approximation of the original. And so was vinyl. I don't see many claims that the harsh approximations of the 33 1/3 LP are damaging ears by the very nature of their artifical reproduction... Unless, of course, you play them too loud
Living in a modern city, it's nearly impossible to not end up with some level of permanent tinnitus, and it worsens with age. However, there's an interesting paradox here: Background noise is required for the auditory system to function properly. Perfect dead silence, for prolonged periods, will also damage the auditory system-- through atrophy due to lack of stimulus (an unexpected discovery from a few fascinating experiments)
Monty
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
"Put down that uninformed pontificating before you poke out an eye"
Is that what the hell that sound is?? I always wondered what that was, how I could be on the second floor and could tell the TV was on on the first floor even though the sound was too low to hear.
Don't let this guy fool you! This article is nothing but a joke to see how many people will listen to ridiculous assertions that are written with impressive words. From the responses it looks like he got you ALL! Big words and a few graphs do not an intelligent article make!
dont worry, just wait till you get a bit older, wont seem so loud
there is something in the article. dont dismiss it out of hand.
1.personal experience: i was badly ill few years ago with undiagnosed viral fever. the fever passed off in five days . everything else was fine, but some thing in the hearing felt odd. waht was happening that a slightly louder noise than the ambient seemed to "echo" with a "click" of the eardrum. wasnt really eardrum but something either inner ear or processing part of the brain. ambient noise levels could be anything from busy traffic to silent midnight (oh, merry Xmas yall). Strong coffee made it more obvious, so may be linked to blood pressure. it was fun listening to music with volume turned down because the percussion was particularly stronger while the problem lasted. on the other hand if someone screamed I felt like kicking them (which I never felt before). the audio irritation lasted a month. it wasnt tinnitus. it wasnt eustachian/innerear/ head sinuses air pressure either, because they were clear. no antibiotics either.
2.until some years ago I used to laugh at audiophiles with their endless obsession for frequency response, etc. then i heard an old valve stereo set vinyl record and the same vinyl record on a good modern set. there was a distinct difference. i felt the sound quality of the transistor-IC electronics was "muddy". a friend said the specs and measurements seemed to be the same, but i could sense the difference. an oldtimer said hifi audio also was actually digital sampling, but valveset's sampling was of higher order then IC's. (?) Want to ask readers -Is this difference I felt and some others felt fairly common? is it actually measurable or just subjective feeling? wouldnt oscilloscopes show it?
3. even the best synthesised sounds lack certain formants and combinations which are characteristic of physical musical instruments . frequency range, increase of temperature during play, combination sounds, interaction with walls , fleeting dynamic combinations, difference beats, techniques of manipulation ( fingering, plucking, delicate minor adjustments and most important microtones, and many other things make a very big difference. there is NO repeat NO comparison between a recording and a live unplugged performance (i mean non-electronically amplified live). People who like to hear music but never had an opportunity to hear it live (again, I mean totally unplugged) get a slow, rising surprise as their "ears" open up. ( I had this experience listening to classical indian instrumental music. after a few times it was like i was earlier seeing things only in greyscale and now in full saturated color.) Maybe this is what the guy's talking about-- mp3's deaden your musical sense. But then ALL recordings do it.
4. cellphones DO cause cancer, powerlines DO cause cancer. some people are allergic to microwave ovens . so dont dismiss it as crank writings out of hand.
Pink? never had any use for it, washed out excuse for a color. Go for full blooded red anyday.
Probly caused by radiation from yer monitor. or the power line. or microwave ovens. or cellphones. or geomagnetic field fluctuation affecting sensitive individuals. or tides/phases of moon. or chemicals in your food and air. or your inferior genes. If you cant read the rest of the post with cited references below you better see a doctor
yeah. maybe theres something in it. dont trivialise observations.
He is saying that a special kind of distortion may play havoc with the neural-accoustic feedback in your brain.
general distortion of sound may bake it sound funny but that's not the issue. The issue is that in order to hear sounds faithfully your ear/brain system has to damp out off-pitch sympathetic vibrations. THe way it does it by actually blanking portions of your hearing spectrum after a loud frequency. MP3 takes advantage of this by actually removing the sound that you would not hear anyhow, thus savinf badwidth.
the point is that at exactly the moment your ears finely tuned feedback circuits are kicking in to supress a part of the spectrum the MP3 is fooling with the exitation of the nerves in that part of the spectrum. Thus even though you cant hear it, your ears predictive feedback is not encoutnering the expected signal and thus, being adaptive, might actually become an incorrect predictor of the damping signal. hence ringing.
Ordinary distortions may make the music sound funny but at least it is continuous and predictable. thus your ear should adapt correctly to ordinary distortion.
or at least that was the thesis
...is birth... :-p
I don't know enough about the human hearing system to say if their description of it is corrcet or not, so let's assume that it is. In that case the claim that the ear cannot calibrate itself with mp3 compressed sound is incorrect, as these signals for self calibration is claimed to be generated by resonances within the cochlea. These signals will therefore not be missing at all. What the compression algorithms are removing are sounds in the music that would be masked by these resonances anyway.
:-)
At the end of the paper the author claim to repeatedly have tinnitus (which then is not tinnitus at all, because tinnitus is *permanent*, thank you very much) despite listening to music only at low volumes. He seems to blame this on mp3 compression, despite the fact that he according to his own words never listen to that either.
The article is listed under the part of the authors web that is dedicated to "Logology" which according to the author is "the first Cyberage religion".
So, the only thing left to determine, is if this is irony, or if the author is insane. I sure don't know.
But my point (which btw is well expressed by "The Matrix") is that anything before brain processing is irrelevant. As someone pointed out in another thread, you can train your brain to see upside things right side up and then train it back to normal, with no damage. So any miscalibration can always be corrected by succeeding inputs. But the thing is, it is the brain that decides what is important and what is extraneous, and what I'm trying to say is that most brains don't care about whatever lossy compression cuts out anyway.
I don't know. Generally training that is *harder* than reality is a better skill builder than easier/simpler. Worf did not battle bunny rabbits on the holedek.
This is not really true. Notice you mention the holodeck, which by definition is easier than reality. You don't have to deal with actually being killed. The way most people practice skills, whether it is playing the violin, doing an appendectomy, or learning how to fight with a Klingon Bat'leth, is to start easy, and to build upon that. Once simple skills become automatic, it is easier to learn more complicated skills. This does not work very well in reverse. Just because you learn a complicated skill from the start does not mean you can perform, much less understand, the simple skills that it is built upon.
you can train your brain to see upside things right side up and then train it back to normal, with no damage.
I don't think they did long-term studies. The filtering may cause one to misjudge the loudness, and thus damage their hearing more than they otherwise would, kind of like the way that cheap sunglasses didn't filter out UV, and people had a false sense of security. (Nobody knows about this sound issue for sure, but it should be looked into.)
Notice you mention the holodeck, which by definition is easier than reality. You don't have to deal with actually being killed.
Not really. It can be made harder than reality, but with smaller penalties than reality. IOW, more likely to lose, but the penalty for loss is not death, just bad grades. It is not practical to program in actual death, for reasons that are hopefully obvious.
Table-ized A.I.
Evidence please. Please site cases where this has happened.
I don't belive you, its pretty much impossible to do.
The only death I know attributable to MJ was caused by bales landing on someone after being pushed out of a plane !
What's going on is the frame rate is faster than your cognative ability to see it, there is a strobe effect going on at 60Hz. You are able to detect it when some other neuron in your body is firing at a similar rate so that you get a beat frequency you can cognitively detect. Sometimes just chewing gum is enough to breifly freeze frame the TV so that you can see the horizontal scan bar. Another easy way to see it is to spread your fingers before your eyes and rapidly move the back and forth. Not only will you strobe your fingres but you can see the scan bar on the TV if you do it at the right rate.
It is entrirely plausible that one can create effects in MP3s that are sub-cognative, yet still cause neurons to fire. Whether you detect this might depend upon what else you are doing. say jogging. And how it shows up, say loss of balance, might be hard to notice as a being cause by the Mp3
Even though it may be unnoticeable on computer hardware, you can actually hear the sound loss on REAL hi-fi setups. If you're a music lover, use REAL hardware to fulfill your passion. There's no secret for this. Marantz, Denon, Bose, Mark Levinson, JBL, Bang&Olufsen etc. just don't apply. My setup is composed of:
Super detailed music all around, incredible dynamics, and the defects of MP3s just jump to you ears when you compare it to the original CD recording. You can even spot defects in the original recording process itself (for example the acoustic bass amplification stage in "The Rite Of Strings" is just horrible, which is a pity because the music in itself is just great - to compare with the one in Corea's "Past, Present and Futures" where it really shines).
And even though I invested $10k in this system, it's not even the price of really high-end stuff (some digital to analog converters cost twice as much...). I don't have the means for more and anyway my ear is not that precise. But I never really "listen" to music on anything else, and the Harmann Kardon system in my car just highlights Harmann Kardon setup defects more than recording defects.
If all of the invent's of the mankind was perfect ever occur the same, a colateral damage was performed at any part of the body.
Waves are waves. If this was really going to be a problem, it has already happen back when synthesizer came out, so we are already too late if this nonsense where true. Articles like this always seem to be written by people who like to play on the fact that they won't be around to be proven morons.
--sex
Sex - Find It
--sex
Sex - Find It
14 years old. Parent post.
You love 'em. You're also a 14-year-old boy. That makes you a 14-year-old gaybo.
A much better resource on gayboes. The previous link is still valuable and informative, but this one is the definitive article.