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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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..Like the sound of one hand clapping?
R4NT.com - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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Well, if our emotions are affected by what we cannot hear, maybe it's a blessing in disguise that my new car stereo got ripped off on Sunday (from the church parking lot during service, nonetheless, bastards.....)
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.
.. sounds we block out ourselves?
It would go a long way to explaining why talking to my mother still pains me, even after I drone her out..
Gotta remember to get one of those cannon thingies for next valentines day. Turn it on at just the right time and whammo. ;)
Some physical affects were also experienced, including tingling in the back of the neck and a strange feeling in the stomach.
Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that the pre-concert banquet might've been contaminated with something?
"This food is problematic."
I nominate them for an ig-nobel prize
The Sound of Silence, indeed.
Maybe she wouldn't get so mad if you spelled fiance correctly.
Spencer Ogden
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/
I hope you weren't refering to this part of the article: "Those feeling uncomfortable when the concert began, found their mood turning to anger."
Because then the whammo might be a door slamming, or a back-hand slamming ;)
Yeah - this probably explains why my girlfriend's mood changes the same way whether I fart silently or not...
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?
Now infrasound messages. Only... would a tinfoil hat work against these sounds, or just amplify them?
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
Surely this has been known about for over a half century. One of Robert Heinlein's earliest novels, Sixth Column/The day after tomorrow contains examples of using subliminal music to frighten the occupying forces.
...when I feel the walls shake to the beat of some faraway b-boy with boom boom speakers filling up the back seat of their lame import I feel nothing but anger.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
Mr O'Keefe added: "When places affect people physically and they aren't able to explain it, they often attribute their feelings to being near a ghost."
And I would've gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!
Inanimate objects were also strangely affected by jumping off countertops, showing their incredible, pitiful anguish for the music's deep feelings. Buildings showed their emotion by creating cracks in their foundations, no doubt in sympathy for the bifircated feelings expressed in song.
An arbitrary experiment in contentless websites has revealed how people's emotions are unaffected by websites they cannot see...
Wait for it.... ah... slashdotted.
Jesus Christ. She's a girl, so it's fiancée.
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.
Scientists have begun analysing the responses of 250 people who took part in the study into the effects of infrasound, carried out at Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral last September. They showed the audience's emotions intensified as the inaudible sound vibrations, too low for the human ear to perceive, were blasted out during a 50-minute piano recital.
This sounds an awful lot like depression, the intensified emotions that is. I know this is a little early to tell, but could these experiments help us understand depression a bit more?
void
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And right in the middle of a Clarinet solo.... "Ppbpbpbppbpbt! ppt. pbbbpbt!" Piles and piles.... Everywhere....
changes your mood poll.
1) The Silent Fart
2) The Wife/Girlfirend
3) That sound you *know* Uncle Sam makes as he dips into your pocket
4) The sound of your carrer flushing down the bowl post bubble.
5) The sound of my Karma flushing down the bowl after this post.
6)Cowbow Neal's Silent Farts
People would pay good money to see this guy sit down at a piano and NOT play it!
(Anyone remember his name?)
if you are looking to get rid of the silent treatment, try the following:
"Oh, the silent treatment? Good. Now I finally have some peace and quiet."
Guaranteed to put a loud and immediate stop to the silent treatment.
I wonder if they had to pay royalties to those who have copyrighted silence.
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
quite some time now. How many times have you actually read an OS-specific article and feel a strong urge to either back up comments promoting the stability or other "good" criteria of your OS of choice or lambast arguments mentioned by supporters of other OSs?
Almost every time? Heh, poor mortals... I bet you never view the source for the particular article now, didn't you? How else can you miss the <EMBED FILE="/sounds/brainwash/BSD_is_dead.wav" TYPE="sound/propaganda-OS_activism">.
Don't bother checking the pages now... I'm sure the Slashdot gods have now detected my blasphemous post and deleted such references accordingly.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Those feeling uncomfortable when the concert began, found their mood turning to anger.
;- )
[...]
During the concert, guests were asked to fill in questionnaires
I know I tend to get a lil' angry when I'm asked to fill in questionnaires while I'm trying to enjoy a concert...
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
How people are effected by the sound of tectonic plates moving, or how people are effected by the sound made by giant crickets from Mars ( which might well be good to know come the invasion)
Are you ready to Ruuuuuuuuummmmmmmble?
It's certainly no secret that people are effected by really, really low bass notes. As the article itself notes church organs have been using this trick to spice up the "Glory Hallelujahs" for centuries.
The part that's interesting is that seems to be a mood *enhancer*, rather producing any specific effect, so if the power of the Lord is already moving you that organ is going to move you more.
Let's hear it for the Church and gut level empiricism.
Don't install one of these "sub-sub-woofers" if you have pissy neighbors though. It reminds of the Bill Cosby joke about cocaine:
"It enhances my personality"
"Yeah, but what if you're an asshole?"
KFG
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?
A bizarre experiment in soundless music has revealed how people's emotions are affected by noises they cannot hear...
No big deal.
My girlfriend's emotions are affected by things I never said.
John Cage had this already in his piece 4'33"...
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
Standing waves are created by parallel reflecting surfaces.
/.ed, and I didn't note the site of the experiment, but I can't imagine you'd test this in a place likely to be effected by standing waves.
Gakk... site is now
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
But oddly, this (for whatever friggin' reason) reminded me of a deaf couple I once saw fighting. The guy got really angry and closed his eyes. The lady was SO FURIOUS that he wasn't "listening" to her that she tried to PRY the other guy's eyes open with her fingers! What I wouldn't have given to know what they were talking about!
(Am I a bastard for laughing HARDER b/c I knew that they couldn't hear me?)
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/
"True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity. This was determined empirically in Australia, where a new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died.
From Borland's Turbo C Reference Guide..."
The internet says it's true, and that's good enough for me.
Why bombard him with soundless music when we can bombard him with tasteless music. 24/7 of N-Sync should pound him into submission.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Simon and Garfunkle tried it before, but it took Pootie Tang to make it work...
Fnord.
This just proves my belief that whenever you think
you need to be within certain limits, you need to
design about an order of magnitude beyond them.
So is there some music recording equipment that
goes from tens of millihertz to a megahertz?
How difficult would it be to make one?
.
Error encountered in IAWebSig.clsSig.Create: Last Procedure: sPrc_Ins_tblSig
A decade ago, when I was into speaker design as a hobbiest, I remember reading about subsonic sounds having an effect on people in an audio book or journal. IIRC, they talked about at least one experiment. Basically, it found that people felt uneasy when exposed to low frequency sound and suggested that some old drafty castle halls and rooms that had a reputation for being haunted could designs that caused inaudible low frequency standing waves. My memory's a bit hazy (hey, it's been 10 years), but I'm pretty sure that some researches found a couple of places where that was the case.
Anyone remember that urban legend about chickens heads exploding because of a near by factory that generated an inaudible 7khz tone which resonated perfectly on a chicken's skull?
:)
Wonder if that's what these scientists originally set out to debunk
is if the people would've reacted the same way if absolutely nothing was played at all, just sitting there. I'm sure some of them might've still gotten angry after figuring out they just wasted an hour listening to genuine silence. :)
Because it's about grace. It really is about grace.
I mean, I don't hear my bank account growing, I don't hear any nice young women calling me, and I don't hear anybody respecting my opinions.
And strangely enough, that makes me feel down.
emotions are affected by noises they cannot hear...
My emotions are affected by cars and beowolf clusters I cannot own.Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Think of all those high-church folks who maintain that "rock is a tool of the devil."
Okay, hang in there, and don't mod me down YET...
My father for years has preferred a high-church style worship service, where the newer, "pop" elements such as drums and bass guitar are shunned. He has maintained that certain types of music themselves are capable of creating a purely emotional response, independent of the actual spiritual qualities of the music. For this reason, he feels it's dangerous to emphasize rock-style worship services, because there might be confusion or conflict between the emotional push of the music and the individual's ability to freely approach his God on his own terms, without someone else kicking at his subconcious.
The spiritual aspects of this aside, I believe this article lends some credence to that viewpoint.
(I rather LIKE the bass and drums, and I personally feel that I often NEED a kick in the rear, so to speak, to get me paying attention to the spiritual. So it's okay with me to use infrasound to get my attention...)
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
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 ;) )
John Cage totally has Paul Simon beat in the 'sound of silence' game. His song, 4'33", IS silence!
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
I strongly suspect that those stupid Windows startup jingles have an infrasound component. Drives me NUTS every time I hear it...
That would also explain why they were so expensive.
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
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)
Perhaps I should get into soundless music. That way, no one will have to yell at me from across the hall to turn it down!
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I found the project group's website at spacedog.biz, the webpage being specfically http://www.spacedog.biz/infrasonic.htm
I thought it was just "ooh ah ah ah", you know, in that screeching monkey type voice.
The government has been using this for years in their orbital mind control lasers.
fnord
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'm speechless.
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
When I first read this, I thought it was about pieces like "2:42", which is a carefully "composed" piece that dictates the manner the piece is to be approached, the behaviour of the "player" while the piece is performed, and is really a study in what is, and is not, music. The "piece" is composed of full rests, and is typically performed by approaching, sitting down and being ready to play the piano for, you guessed it, two minutes and fourty-two seconds.
;^)
The crowd reaction/noises are, in effect, the composition.
It has been transcribed to other instruments, if you don' thave a piano handy...
Ken
They "screech", I believe.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
More than 30 years ago, I read a kids' mystery book centered on The Three Investigators (roughly equivalent to Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys but a bit smarter) where infrasound was used in a supposedly haunted house.
Other animal group names include:
pariament of owls
shrewdness of apes
and
raft of otters.
We know.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Actually, I think you misunderstood the basic premise of the experiment. The "Infrasound" was added on top of music played by a Russian pianist. In Soviet Russia....wait, I promised I wouldn't make a lame reference.
The parties reached agreement without litigation
One out-of-court settlement could be regarded as a slight (but not precedent setting) win for the copyright or patent owner, as it makes the others marginally more likely to settle or face the full wrath of the legal system.
What seems to have ticked off Cage's heirs is the implication that Mr. Bat and Mr. Cage had collaborated on the piece and was thus trading on his reputation without authority.
So would it be wise to think of it as more of a trademark issue than a copyright issue? In that case, Cage's estate would be able to sue Midway, as Midway's Mortal Kombat video game (which features a character named "JOHNNY CAGE") plays an excerpt of "4"33'" (that is, calls the MusicStop() function) during some of the menus.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There's no infrasound in the Windows start sound, at least in the versions I use. I just ran "The Microsoft Sound.wav" (Windows 95 boot), "The Microsoft Sound.wav" (Windows 98 boot), "Windows Logon Sound.wav" (Windows 2000/ME boot), and "Windows Logoff Sound.wav" (Windows 2000 shutdown) through a Cool Edit low-pass filter with cutoff frequency 20 Hz, and negligible[1] energy remained. (I did not test Windows XP boot sounds because I don't have immediate access to a Windows XP machine at my location.)
[1] I define "negligible" as anything whose average power is less than -48 dBFS, the absolute noise floor of 8-bit linear PCM.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"They showed the audience's emotions intensified as the inaudible sound vibrations, too low for the human ear to perceive, were blasted out during a 50-minute piano recital. Those feeling uncomfortable when the concert began, found their mood turning to anger. Others, who had felt happy, started to notice sensations of joy." Hmm, I wonder if joyous ones were women and the angry ones were their husbands who were dragged to a piano recital.
Look at the emotional reaction of a parent after more than 30 seconds of sudden silence from the kids. Shock, then fear, usually followed by anger...
I guess it's not the first time that people get moved by music from Liverpool without being able to hear it. A similar worldwide experiment took place between 1962 and 1966. Then the lads made music to be listened to.
Howler monkeys scream like banshees. You can hear them from their small cage most of the way across the Seattle Zoo. Other monkeys' noises sort of pale in comparison.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I have that damn Britney Spears song running through my head again. I wonder how that hap...
oh.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
pootie tang's latest track was soundless music, and it was soundless music too.
Pootie done did it again! Pootie done did it again!
My life is dedicated hosting
There's only so much torture you can give before it becomes inhumane..
I'm fairly sure N'Sync for more than 5 minutes is cruel and unusual punishment.
Tortured like that for 10 minutes, he'd probably die of an internal hemorrhage, or give up the locations of every missile in the country, and give you his 67 wives.
(don't get optimistic. Only two if the wives are remotely cute)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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
Lisa Simpson: You have to listen the notes she's not playing.
Other Patron: Pfft, I could do that at home.
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.
I want to know the sound pattern that triggers people to be horney, particularly women. Maybe I'll set up a small infra-sound system at a club, or in my room :)~~ I'm just dirty like that.
...like the smell of a barking spider.
"Out of the cave, right now, you filthy mouth breathing neolithic bastard!"
If a bear shits in the woods and.... ah, never mind.
next($sig) unless($sig =~
George Washington University's National Security Archive has a playlist of what the psyops guys used to subdue Noriega here. See Pages 4, 5, and 6 specifically.
/Abraham Simpson : Turn it up... TURN IT UP!!!!
We used to have a borrowed sine wave generator to play with when we were kids. It initially seemed to be doing something, but as we couldn't hear anything, we decided to find out if it was actually working. We brought in the normally lazy cat, and cranked up the generator...the cat exited at high speed. I'm sure there were emotions related to that experiment, but beyond our reaction of laughter, the cat was not in any mood to provide details.
And me without a matching set of aluminum foil earplugs and pointed hat!
The first thing I thought of, when I saw this topic come up, was a Hardy Boys book that also used the same type of effect in a supposedly-haunted house. I never read The Three Investigators. Did one copy from the other?
No Laughing Allowed!
Very geeky, realistic(YMMV), and cool in that early 60's sort of ham radio way.
Technology ruins those kind of stories.
Good books for a kid who likes Harry Potter - the 3 do all these things relying on brain power and not magic. The thinking may transfer....
Maybe not deafening, but isn't this a form of remote mind control?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Yesss! :) Look at all those massaging chairs people bought over the time. Wonderful vibrations, make you feel nice and comfortable.
Hyperom.com
I vaguely remember this book, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I read this. IIRC, they used a pipe organ where the pipes had been lengthened to decrease the frequencies, and it generated feelings of fear for those inside the haunted house.
:)
Three Investigators was as great series of books, though. I always wished I had a hideout like their RV hidden under the junkyard.
??? (For those who understand the reference
-- Silhouette
Because of this reasoning, infrasound would be an absolutely horrible terrorist weapon, unless you claimed responsibility for it. There's a reason that terrorism utilizes really horrific methods that are really public.
I seem to recall that elephants communicate using low frequency waves. I wonder what any elephants that might have been within range thought of the crap they were hearing.
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.
I think the Monty Python album was promoted as being "three- sided".
I bought an album at a thrift store yesterday that was similar. It was produced sometime in the 1950's or 60's for the purpose of playing bingo at home. The record came with cards, and the audio was someone calling out "B-2, N-34" etc. The cool thing is that there are 4 intertwined spirals so that when the needle drops, you get one of 4 possible tracks.
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...
In The Exorcist they used some sub-aural sounds to scare. When I saw it in rerelease a couple of years ago (perfect date movie) after a decade of making dance records with 808 kick drums etc ... I could here some very bass-y tones providing ominous ambience.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
can you say, "expectation effect"?
& I wish I knew the password to your heart . . . &
I remember reading sometime ago a theory on how the effect of the low frequency componets of thunders is what made ancient people think of them as signs form the Gods. Also I think hearing a thunder out in the country where there are less obstacles to attenuate it is far more "moving" than hearing it in a city.
By Laura Davis, Daily Post
Some physical affects were also experienced...
Some physical effects were also experienced
You've got to cry when Slashdotian type errors occur in proper (?) journalism.
I'm surprised that they didn't mix up you're, and your, and there, their, and they're.
Laura Davies, hang your head in shame.
Get your own free personal location tracker
From Microsoft.com
If at first you don't succeed... How does that go again? Ah, forget it.
Ok geek call here but I'd *love* to get a copy of that Bingo album. Could you post up as many details as you have about that album so I could try to track it down... cheers
im sure being inside an air-lock re and depressurizing 10-times-per-second will change one's mood.
*I used to be quite irreverent and ignorant. I am probably much smarter now. I seem to realize this every 45 days or so.
Probably that those darned whales never shut up.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If it's true that urban industrial infrasound pollution disturbs our bodies and minds, would it be possible to design passive or active noise reduction strategies to create a healthier living and working environment?
E.g. silent rooms with insulation specifically designed to cut-out infrasound, or with anti-noise panels that actively eliminate it?
I'm reminded of the effects of infrasound on marine mammals. Various armed forces use ultra-low level sound waves for carrying information across oceans, and some researchers believe this interferes with the navigation systems of whales and dolphins. Think cetecean brown noise...
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Not only on cathedral organs and nazi experiments, but on simple every day life subwoofers this is on work as well. Most good(==expensive) subwoofers use a wide range of low frequencies that can only be "heard" by the body.
It's not very difficult to imagine how it works. Remember how some low beat sounds in night clubs makes the body tremble.
I think there had been even more interesting experiments regarding infrasound. One of them was related to temporary hallucinations that would induce the image of 'ghosts' at the periphery of your vision. This was actually confirmed experimentally iirc.
The other interesting thing was that it is possible to use infrasound to create the effect of a noise that is coming from behind you. A noise coming from behind you naturally gets you 'anxious' and 'worried' because of the implications. (And yes, it is possible to make a sound coming from anywhere to sound as if it is coming from anywhere else - there are standard filtering techniques for that). Anyway, there are some particular infrasound frequences that have the 'behind you' effect I think.
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
The article doesn't mention how they controlled for the piano music playing. So how do they know the people weren't reacting to the audible music?
Come on. Give me a break. This isn't science! You put a million coders in a room at the same time and tell them: "Hey, we are doing something to you. How are we affecting your coding?" Some people will say I am better... and some will say I am worse. Who cares if this pseudosilence is being played or not. Whatever. Just drawing attentions to somebody's emotions will probably cause someone to focus on those emotions and make them more intense. The control group will eliminate this "placebo" response. Do this for a week at a concert. For half the concerts have the pseudosilence playing... for the other half don't. Geez... just basic ole science. Davak
From the summary page:
SouthCom has not yet produced a Noriega Compact Disc of these songs, so you'll have to dig them out of your personal music library, if you can.
From an update on a further page:
8/01: If you cannot find them in your personal music library, maybe someone else has a copy on one of the numerous file-sharing applications on the web.
Ok, so I made that update up...but it's a nice playlist they have on pages 4-6. Some really good classic rock.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Before starting your experiments, please note that silence is patented.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Interesting acronym.. did you just make this up, or is it widely used? (I'm presuming it's like RTFM but for google)
;-)
Oh.. hold on...
I've googled and found it in the jargon file.
Still, I'd never heard it before.
...mood organ anyone?
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
That's from an old, old Mad magazine! Late '70s timeframe.
...", then the needle would take one of six possible paths, each of which described some kind of personal catastrophe.
It was one of those "floppy vinyls" you could tear out of the magazine and play on a turntable. The song would start out with this "Super Spectacular Day" song, which was all cheery "Until
My EX fiancee and I were driving home from a friend's house -- an hour ride -- and she was pissed off and not talking. I put some music on the radio and lit up a butt. About 15 minutes down the highway she said "well, I'm not going to ride all the way home in silence."
I said, "I knew it was too good to be true."
end of the silence... start of a fight...
Real life is full of sounds too low for you to hear. They probably cause sensations on the back of your neck and wierd feelings in your stomach all day. Adding infrasound to a concert made it seem more 'real' by adding these wierd sensations. Those that were going to hate the concert anyway REALLY hated it and those that were going to like it REALLY liked it.
Eat at Joe's.
I thought somone had spiked my drink, bloody terrorists and there infrasound wiped me out for a day and I spent the next 3 days recovering.....
(I think it was a hystermine release)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Another interesting point made by Ballard in a long story (short novel?) of him, many years ago:
The Sound-Sweep, Science-Fantasy #39 '60
According to this Space Dog article by the same researchers, "The female elephant, for example, is only in oestrus for four days or so, once every four years. When she's ready for mating, she emits a distinctive, infrasonic call that attracts males from up to 4 kilometres away."
We asked the "test subjects" to tell us which music was the original and which music was a copy. IN EVERY case, we played the exact same song from the exact same source, and in every case the "test subject" would pick the music heard in the dark as the original.
This proved that light, undetectable to human ear sounds, have effect the listening experience. I suppose it could be extrapolated that since Music affects mood, so would inaudibles.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
When passing parked cars, i can hear if their car-alarm is activated. Only for some alarms tho, others are maybe of better quality/other frequencies.
It'd be really nice if the site had released an MP3 of what they were doing in that theatre, so we could "listen."
Oh, wait...
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.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but I was a member of a band in 1997 (Urilliasekt) that did several infrasound performances. I didn't have a 12m long pipe and a big expense account, so settled for using computer generated tones through performance speakers that harmonized at the desired frequencies. Even though I thought I was brilliant in coming up with the idea, I later found out that someone else had thought of it first. The British Army experimented with harmonzing tones to produce infrasound in 1973. . . as a form of crowd control in Ireland. They had to stop because it induced epileptic seizures in some of the listeners.
-oakbox
Not just answers, the correct questions.
... as the film companies slip in emotion inducing infrasound to enhance the emotional content of the movies. "That movie moved me so much!" Yup. Like at 4 Hz.
....
And an enterprising pan-handler with some technical savvy
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
An interesting album to listen to with such a setup is Ryoji Ikeda's matrix for rooms. (review here).
From the review...
Now, by turning your head and/or slowly moving around the room, the sounds do change, slightly... perhaps with a little more patience and better-developed neck muscles I could have learned to "play" a particular tune, but mostly only get a bit of an not-excitingly-noticeable up-down-up-down pitch shift, sort of.
If I remember correctly, this is available on the MAD CD library (it was in stores a few years ago -- every issue of MAD scanned in, from the '50's to 1999 or so).
"We got chick brains -- in vitro -- to dump 80 percent of the natural opioids in their brains,'"
Aw, man! I've been tryin to get chicks to dump their brain opioids for all this time without infrasound!
I don't know what that means, but it sure sounds pimpin.
I wonder if there might be a reverse of this sound that would calm people down.
It seems like if there are sounds that amplify emotions, there should be sounds that diminish emotions.
That would be great for places where riots or brawls break out. Instead of spraying pepper-spray at the crowd a few days ago, the Epitome security guards could have just played the calming infrasounds.
I didn't know he played the piano!
Was ally mcbeal in the audience?
Anyone else think we'll see stores seriously investing in bose speakers now? (to play these sounds that manipulate how you feel.) Customers will just think they /really/ like that store!
"Why bombard him with soundless music when we can bombard him with tasteless music. 24/7 of N-Sync should pound him into submission" And land you in front of a war crimes tribunal. There are laws against torture.
>> Guaranteed to put a loud and immediate stop to the silent treatment.
Huh. Also likely to put a loud and immediate stop to your life.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Pooty Tang does it again!
So, now there's a study which would seem to encourage the move back towards higher fidelity audio recordings, namely SACD and DVD-Audio. (I don't think we're going back to vinyl.) I suspected as much, but it's good that someone has executed a scientific study on the matter, although more studies are certainly needed.
And they say on the Internet nobody knows if you're a dog... ;)
Seriously tho, what if we are losing our high frequency hearing because of all these irritating CRTs blasting out 15+KHz over the years?
I am really really pissed off that I wasted my time and money buying something that has no sound.
Come to think of it, I can see the new Conway Twitty Greatest Hits album.....74 minutes of silence.....
WTF? Over?
In Japan, we actually have a "sound" that is made by a completely silent situation. It goes like this:
No kidding.
There are some theories about the origin. The most believeable is that it was originally worded to match the "white noise" that your body creates itself in the absence of other sound. You can hear it if you listen carefully enough. (Or if you have tinnitis.)
From my understanding of the article, what we have is a karaoke version of Max Smart's Hall of Hush?
Subsonic == Earthquake
Earthquake == Bad
therefore
Subsonic == Bad
Here is the first book I remember reading that mentioned it. The Secret of Terror Castle (Three Investigators, No 1)
Here is the link
This book was published in 1964, as a childrens mystery book. Not exactly new science.
-dave-
Use BearShare for all your p2p needs!
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
Dogs' hearing extends to much higher frequencies than humans. Dogs cannot hear low frequency sounds that humans can hear. This is why thunderstorms freak out dogs, they can't hear the thunder, but they can feel it.
Responding to another thread, yes, organs and synthesizers do create sound that is outside the range of human hearing, but it's not done as part of some mind-control experiment, it affects the quality of the sound that you can hear(somehting to do with harmonics). Anyway that's what I recall from Music Theory...
My other sig is extremely clever...
Seriously tho, what if we are losing our high frequency hearing because of all these irritating CRTs blasting out 15+KHz over the years?
We are losing our high frequency hearing... but it is certainly not because of the frequency emitted by CRT's.
Case in point: The majority of the world's population isn't around a CRT enough (if ever) to get any kind of ear damage because of a CRT. People who are also well-nourished enough and live in a rural enough areas to discount environmental damage.
It's still quite possible to test these people for the range of frequencies they can hear. And it has happened, and is well documented.
The findings are relatively conclusive: As you get older, the maximum audible frequency decreases with age.
The rate of degradation is fairly constant, however there are factors which do increase the degradation.
For instance, an American who:
* doesn't listen to loud music
* has never been to a dance club or rock concert
* doesn't work at an airport, etc...
* but is frequently exposed to 'normal' noise
* (ie. Ned Flanders)
Will have a lower rate of hearing degradation.
However, when an American attends his/her first rock concert or other prolonged exposure to that level of volume, s\he will show a measurable (and permanent) decrease in the maximum frequency that s\he can hear.
The reason that many MP3 encoders filter out anything above 16 kHz is that around 25-30 years old, that is the maximum frequency the average human can hear. Why retain information that all but the most golden of adult ears will be unable to hear? That is an example of how most such engineering works -- fitting the solution to 99.999% of the problem.
Its also why the developers of the CD figured that a maximum reproduceable frequency above 20kHz would be sufficient -- They went for the maximum possible (at the time, which was 22. kHz) in a failed attempt to satisfy the audiophiles.
(Disclaimer: I have a scientific disdain for audiophinles: Audiophiles will pay $4000 for a *power cable* which they believe will give them better sound -- when the electrical utility's wiring is (far and away) the weakest link. Who cares how clean the power is from your house to the audio equipment -- the vast majority of any noise is going to come in from the miles of wire from the power plant to their home-- not from the feet of wire from the power plug to their equipment... or their house's wiring...)
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
A fart can sure affect people's emotions even if they dont hear it.
This seems to support arguments in favor of the wider frequency ranges offered by the higher definition music formats, DVD-Audio and SACD. While this seems to deal mainly with those frequencies below 20Hz, high-def audio proponents also claim that there are frequencies, above 20,000Hz, that can affect the enjoyment of music. Of course, your speakers have to be able to reproduce those frequencies. :)
So it's probably those gsd-dsmned inaudible base overtones from those fscking boom cars that those dsck-weed kids drive up and down my csck-sscking street all dsmn hours of the day that have been fscking pissing me off all this time!
Otherwise, I'm usually a very laid-back person.
Ok, assume that some large organization (preferrably an acroymn ending with AA) who's members have discovered the use of these "subsonics" to induce "happiness" and other emotions.
1) These emotion influencing subsonics can increase sales of songs in which they are embedded.
2) Control of emotions can be useful at large events or for other large organizations (government).
3) MP3's probably strip out the subsonics (depending on the bitrate, of course)... so they attenuate the usefulness of these subsonic-embedded songs. Thus removing the control element.
Is this why the music industry is also anti-MP3, even though they could embrace the future of music?
Is this why the government is loathe to control the "music cartel"? Because ultimately, the cartel is more useful than the alternative?
Curiouser and curiouser...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Agreed but for one distinction - that's the maximum that (Western) adults have indicated they can hear in lab tests. This has some applicability, but it's also about the test. People thought they knew the resolving limits of human vision until someone developed the vernier acuity test. A lot depends on the test, and we've only begun to get clever in developing them. Things like threshold and JND tests are interesting and useful, but not the final word. There is no final word.
Ultrasound may (probably does) affect the perception and experience of other sound, just as the infrasound in the informal experiment cited in the article. This could be true even when it's clear that the cochlea isn't responding at the high end where it used to. There may be (are) other mechanisms of response we don't know about yet.
That doesn't change the utility of the studies of course, nor many of the inferential conclusions. For instance it's pretty ironclad that normal response to high frequency sounds declines steadily with age (and acutely with trauma) as you note. But I wouldn't assume from that that a low-pass filter (or 44kHz sampling resolution) can't change the listening experience for a 65 year old listener. I think it still can, even if subtly.
World Forum for Acoustic Ecology
Silence and Noise
World Soundscape Project
Damn those pesky terrorists
I think you mean "Schrödingerian." ;-)
Everything is music,
-Toddhisattva
Ripped off from here
Some of the other techniques described in articles linked from that site involve direct brain stimulation by VHF or microwave energy.
If they start going into general use - even intermittently - it may be time for the tinfoil hats.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Exactly. Another thing is that movie producers know very well about the effects that sound can have on their audience. They will sometimes introduce inaudible, low-frequency noise ( 20 Hz), because it has that very effect. Lower frequencies tend to raise anxiety, and so they're used in situations when they audience is supposed to be gripped with fear or suspense.
When someone drops a silent but deadly, I obviously can't hear it, but it definitely affects my emotions (such as "RUNNN!!!").
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Not a very technical article, but interesting nonetheless.
One thing that REALLY bugged me about the article is that it said "scientists" did this experiment, but DIDN'T say WHICH scientists, not naming people, the institution, the funding agency, etc.
Makes it hard to find out more about the experiment.
(At least they named the site where it was performed. So if the paper, excerpts, or another more complete report made it to the web we might be able to dig it out with a keyword search, rather than retreating to a library and digging out the medical and accoustic journals.)
And then the media wonder why people no longer look to them for news...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As stated in the article itself and as many other posts here have indicated, people have _knwon_ for quite a long time that ultralow frequency sound has an effect on people. So someone came up with an experiment to test exactly what that effect is, complete with control group and everything.
Neither the thing they are testing nor the method used to test it seem particularly bizare to me.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Letterman also owns it.
My emotions are affected by noises I cannot hear everytime I play nethack...
You hear a jackal howling at the moon. --more--
You hear a mumbled curse. --more--
You hear a rushing sound. --more--
It hits! It hits! It hits! --more--
You hear the howling of the CwnAnnwn.
This was "heard" in an ASCII screen. THAT made me shiver.
h@hh@hh@...@.&.... "You shall not pass!"
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.
That's how the pre-semiconductor string-pull talking dolls (starting with "Chatty Cathy") generated multiple sayings. Several spiral tracks, and the one you got depended on the disk position when the needle dropped onto the lead-in.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The second-to-last thing you hear (or don't hear) is a very high audio frequency, lasting a few seconds... John Lennon said it was put there just to annoy your dog.
Coincidentally, I heard the White Album and figured about half of it was entirely audible sounds put there just to annoy humans (-1, Troll).
On CD, they play the loop a few times before ending the track
Is there any theoretical reason they couldn't do the loop 'for real' on a CD and have it actually work on a normal player?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I have also experienced this [hearing "ultrasound"] in physics class, where a high voltage was being passed through a sphere painted with metallic paint. can anyone enlighten me as to how this ultrasonic side-effect occurs in the first place?
If it's being continuously charged (i.e. a van de graff generator with a rubber belt) you'll get ultrasound because the corona discharge makes the system act like a relaxation oscilator:
- Voltage rises until the ionization potential of the air is exceeded and the air molecules start breaking up, becoming conductive.
- The ionized air leaks off charge until the voltage below the extinction potential, and the arc goes out.
- Now the voltage rises again. Repeat indefinitely.
Similar to the way a neon-lamp/capacator/resistor/DC power supply blinky-light works.
The arc heats the air and causes it to rush away, creating a pressure wave. This is what you hear.
The basic cycle will vary with the charging rate and geometry, but typically will be either a high whistle or ultrasonic.
Both the exact timing of the individual arcs and their locations are somewhat random, and ionized gas is a negative resistance (higher current, more ionization, lower voltage) which amplifies any signal at any frequency, so random variations in anything that affects the voltage or current get amplified. People whose hearing quits at a frequency below the basic cyclic rate hear the "envelope" - the lower-frequency variations of the arcing - as a random-noise "hiss". People whose hearing extends up to the cyclic rate or beyond hear the whistle - with the random variations making the whistle sound somewhat hissy, like a breathy note on a flute.
(Of course if the sphere was being charged by a flyback-like electronic high-voltage supply operating at a near-ultrasonic rate, like the flyback system in a TV or monitor, you might just be hearing the power supply, or the arcing happening at the peak of each charging cycle.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"The most recent update from the UN Weapons Inspection team in Iraq has finally provided concrete evidence of weapons of mass destruction. All across the country, pipe organs and other infrasound weapons have been deployed, ready to transmit their deadly sounds to any nearby American citizens.
When asked to comment, Saddam replied, 'What the fuck?'"
I wonder if the people who wrote this example really had something against chickens.
a) Infrasound (7-8hz 150+Decibles) is typically used as a NON-LETHAL weapon (for crowd control). However like most non-lethal weapons it can kill. Thus it is illegal throughout the US (AFAIK).i c_bullet020716.html)
b) untill recently Infrasound was very indiscriminate (anyone in earshot could be effected, and there is no "bullet proof" vest for the police to wear). Which made it hard to use. However HyperSonic Sound (http://www.atcsd.com/tl_hss.html) is working on a device for the US military that will have (very) directional capability. (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/son
In a city region against terrorist, a weapon like this could be invaluable.
c) I doubt terrorists would want to use this because it's
1) not very portable (yet) it requires a BIG LONG tube to create infrasound.
2) is (usually) non-lethal.
Until our children are no longer molded into castrated sheep democracy remains a fake and a danger. -A. S. Neill
This kind of reminds of some of the research I read while investigating higher sample rates in recorded digital music. In the very recent past, proffesional music studios used to record in 48 kHz, and then dither down to 44.1 kHz (the sample rate of music CD's). The main disadvantage to this is that the highest recorded frequeny would be 24 kHz (this is due to the Nyquist Theorum), and CD's do not reproduce any sound above 22.05 kHz. Some research has been done showing that the inclusion of frequencies above 22.05 kHz, which are mostly inaudible, do in fact lead to increased activity in the brain. What this activity is, however, has not yet been identified.