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Soundless Music?
Julez writes "Hi, Found this on icLiverpool's site, thought you might find this interesting.... A bizarre experiment in soundless music has revealed how people's emotions are affected by noises they cannot hear..."
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This is nothing new to listeners of avante garde noise rock.
John Zorn experimented with high pitched frequencies outside of listeners' auditory range on Krystallnacht. Track 2 has high pitched frequencies that coexist with the sound of breaking glass that cause feelings of anger, pain and nausea. The liner notes discourage repeated listening (I kid you not).
The Flaming Lips Did this on Zaireeka, their 4-CD (played simultaneously) experiment--wherein they used frequencies lower than the normal auditory range to create feelings of disorientation (funny since the Flaming Lips most pop-oriented songs can do this too).
I'm sure more examples can be found within the annals of experimental noise rock.
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
Cage's estate actually won a lawsuit over the copyright on this work. Apparently, the estate now has a legal precedent on owning all musical works composed entirely of rests.
Sonny Bono is the personification of counter-productive copyright law.
Will I retire or break 10K?
All mp3 encoders have a high and low pass filter to cut off frequencies outside the range of normal human ears. Even if you disabled this, you'd still need special 'low loudspeakers' that are capable of generating tones that low anyway. (most consumer subwoofers will do down to about 30hz)
So in other words, this won't be a new addition to your home theatre any time soon. (Although an 'emotion' woofer would be really cool on some movies ;) )
I found the project group's website at spacedog.biz, the webpage being specfically http://www.spacedog.biz/infrasonic.htm
dont beleive me? just do a google search for "cathedral infrasonic organ". Or check out this page which mentions the use by nazi's
the fact that the articel mentions none of this prior work sugests this is crap science.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I can confirm this. There was some infamous demo at a conference where someone showed that the resonant frequency of the average anal sphincter muscle was around 37 Hertz. At a high enough acoustic output level, you could cause involuntary resonance of that muscle. So, when I worked for Leslie Speakers in the late 60's, we had a lab room with excellent bass speakers that could put out serious acoustic energy in the 20 to 50 Hertz range. I set up an HP audio oscillator driving something like a 250 watt RMS power amp driving a massive bass speaker in an enclosure, then parked my butt in front of the speaker and with the amp turned up, swept through frequencies. I could feel various internal organs, though very acoustically damped by their internal surroundings, kind of resonantly responding in certain ranges. My guts felt really strange at some frequencies and I could feel unpleasant sensations in my kidneys, and definitely the small intestine. But getting to the point, I found you can get the sphincter to resonate as claimed. I did not carry things too far, as I was afraid of damaging myself internally. By the way, you will NOT get this kind of acoustic wattage out of a home stereo and home speakers. Oh, and you'll never see McGuyver doing this..