Slashdot Mirror
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..."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
The effects of powerful but inaudible vibrations on the human body and nervous system...
Hell, I bet you could even make their ears bleed if you juice it up enough.
It would be an interesting experiment if they had a control group. The end of the story mentions some things they want to try, but if there was any type of control group, I didn't see it mentioned in the story.
end of line
Those are the same responses one would expect with any audience coming to attend an experimental performance. Some would slowly get angry as they began to feel that their time had been wasted. Some would feel amused at watching the rest of the audience. Some would feel conspiritorial as they thought they realized the intent of what was happening - most Music 101 courses have a lecture mentioning experiments where a minute of silence is considered a work of art, where the "music" is the audiences reaction itself.
Don't expect any radical advancements into generalized knowledge about human emotional reaction based on this evidence.
Ryan Fenton
Perhaps this response is similar to the primitive "fight or flight" response. Natural sources of these "infrasounds" include "earthquakes, severe weather, volcanic activity, geomagnetic activity, ocean waves, avalanches, turbulence aloft, and meteors and by some man-made sources such as aircraft and explosions" according to this site: http://www.etl.noaa.gov/et1/infrasound/
No, because the two works share absolutely no similarity. In the case of the John Cage piece the pianist makes *no* noise for four minutes and thirtythree seconds, focusing the attention of the audience on the noises they themselves are making. ( And as an aside the piece isn't properly performed unless the pianist enters the hall, sits, opens the keyboard, THEN remains silent, and finishes the piece by closing the keyboard and taking a bow. That is how it is explicitly written)
In *this* case a piano is playing with a really low bass note underneath. Even deleting the piano a note is still being played, whether you can hear it or not.
KFG
True, but there's still always an interaction between the sound source and the environment. That applies both to the infrasound and the piano piece. The sound bounces around off walls and furniture and people, interferes with itself, beats, gets absorbed, gets concentrated, gets funky...the point being that even in a standard recital, no two people are exposed to the same aural experience because they're necessarily sitting in different places. It starts to get a bit Heisenbergian the more you think about it. And it's even more mixed-up with multiple sound sources.
This is why a live concert will always have value, no matter the fidelity of recording and reproduction. Even if you really could reproduce the sound at a location (which you can't), it'd just be the sweet spot chosen by the sound engineer.
No substitute for being there.
Go into another room. You'd be amazed at the effect that a little bit of stray bass can have on someone. For people that live in close quarters (condos, townhomes, and apartments), this effect is all too common - neighbors might think they're being very kind by keeping the volume low (which they are), but they don't realize that lower frequencies travel further, and are not absorbed by surrounding surfaces at the same rate as higher frequencies. Because of this, even bass at seemingly low levels can be heard clearly enough by people in close proximity to affect concentration, sleep, etc.
As the other reply mentions, you'll need parallel walls for standing waves to form. In addition, the wavelength is sufficiently large enough that everyone would have *some* experience.
If you get a standing wave, there will be silent spots regardless of the wavelength. Now, if the wavelength is greater than twice the size of the room (depending on where the speaker is) you have no chance of getting a standing wave, but that's another matter.
People (well, HiFi geeks) have been lambasting CDs since they came out because digital music doesn't contain the "whole picture" and now with MP3 and OGG we are chucking out even more of the sounds which we can't hear.
This is interesting. The reproduction of your OGG file played through your streaming device on your LAN may sound excellent, but does it have the same power to challenge the emotions?
I can't get so excited about music these days (compared to when I used vinyl), but maybe I'm just getting old...
I have MP3s of these, and haven't noticed a thing. ;-)
--- My dad's political betting
Imagine the following:
... ...recognizes, how his thoughts speed along fixed rails like a train
A: What is the sound of one hand clapping?
B: Thinks about two hands clapping
B: Thinks about one hand
B: Tries to answer the question by thinking about it as he usually does
B:
B: is suddenly able to leave the rails and becomes enlightened.