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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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I wonder if the individual experiences were determined by the location in which the listener sat. It would seem that standing waves could form, with some people getting blasted, while others feel nothing.
Not a very technical article, but interesting nonetheless.
Practice makes rejects
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
In Robert Heinlein's Sixth Column the good guys (defending America against Pan-Asian invaders) use "subsonics" to make people uneasy. That's what this study says "infrasound" (same thing, different name) would do: make people who were already nervous more nervous, without their knowing why.
I assumed this was already well known science; the other possibility is that Heinlein was uncannily prescient (even for him.)
Anyone have more background on this?
This is reminiscent of some of John Cage's avante-garde work. Here is the AMG write-up.
While his creations did not use inaudible sound explicitly, he is famous for his 4'33", a piece of this length completely silent. I have a friend who saw it "performed" live, and he was apparently quite moved. The pianist sits down at the piano, lifts the key-gaurd, and prepares to play. The performer remains attentive at the keys for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, then finishes and closes the key-guard.
My friend said he was struck by how open he became to the sounds around him, to the concertgoers. These were things he'd never heard before. And there was an order to it, that was somehow created from all of the audience members intensely focused on eachother.
This is done by playing two different frequencies into the different ears (ie 300 hz into one ear, 304 into the other: your brain then entrains to a 4hz frequency)
Does anyone have any idea if this device could remove the need for the two frequencies by simply generating the Such things would be useful for brain washing, because if a speaker can put his audience into an alpha state (2/3hz), then they are more susceptible to impressions (thats why many religions use repeditive beating drums in their rituals etc)
Or check out this [borderlands.com] page which mentions the use by nazi's
That sounds scary, but do you know why infrasound weapons haven't been used in actual battle?
Infrasound weapons seem like they'd be good terrorist weapons, because you can't tell whether you've been attacked by one or not. Once the media started reporting that terrorists are using infrasound weapons, any momentary nausea could cause people to get scared and possibly more nauseous.
The shareholder is always right.
Even cooler is the last about 4 seconds of the album, which is an endless loop (when played on vinyl), where the needle stays in the same circular track ad infinitum. On CD, they play the loop a few times before ending the track.
While on the subject of cool vinyl tricks, supposedly (I haven't seen it), Monty Python had a comedy record with two intertwined spiral tracks. So when you played the same side, sometimes you'd get one track, and sometimes the other. Must have totally tripped out some folks.
make world, not war
Because it's not ultrasonic to you - you can hear the 15.75 (or therabouts) kHz horizontal scan of the TV. You may also be able to perceive the 60 Hz vertical scan as a low buzz. Some people can perceive that well into adulthood. I've just about lost it now (at 34), but in high school I could tell if the NTSC green-screen monitors in the Apple ][ lab were switched on from the floor above and a couple of hundred feet away (they were much louder if the computers were off, hence no video signal). It was really pretty irritating sometimes. As you note, tones near the top end can make you feel quite squidgy.
;)
So you (and I) just happen to have a higher top-end than most people your age (I'm guessing), in your cochlea, cortex, or both. This is as much a curse as a blessing so don't go feeling too superior (after all if it were really superior, everyone would be that way). But don't worry, you won't be able to hear it in 5-10 years.
I'm not familiar with the sphere experiment. Possibly your physics teacher was some sort of alien spy. It sounds a bit like the inversion of the way some microphones work, so the sound would have been able to vary with the voltage. But if you could hear it, it was sound, not ultrasound - more or less by definition.
Back in the 1980s, the Center for Computer Music and Acoustics at Stanford was playing around with infrasonics. I had a horse at a barn about a quarter mile away, and the horses got very upset when CCRMA pumped low frequency audio into the ground. Horses get some contact audio via their legs, and can sense footsteps. To them, this sounded like some big creature they couldn't see. I complained to the head of CCRMA, and they stopped doing outdoor tests.
My father was a teenager in Los Angeles during the 20's. Years ago, he told me that the director of Ben Hur (I think the 1925 version) wanted a scene of a crowd stampeding. Since the crowd was comprised of extras who didn't have a lot of acting experience, the director induced panic by playing a note on a 20 foot long organ pipe. The note was infrasonic and generated a level of unease that the extras couldn't identify but when instructed to run, they willing complied.