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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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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.
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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
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.
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.