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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.
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."
The Sound of Silence, indeed.
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/
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?
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
...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.
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
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
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
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?
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
.
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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.
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
You sound rather dismissive. Why would this be fundamentally different than the effects of ultrasound? That can be used to achieve diagnostic imaging and therapeutic effects on soft tissues.
Why would other physical effects for infrasound be so unbelievable/preposterous/trivial?
Considering their mention of a possible rational cause for "haunted" emotional states, I'd say that they're working from a good perspective; and the potential could be very lucrative, scientifically speaking, but potentially nasty, commercially--imagine a little joy-inducing infrasonic emitter either in honeymoon suites at a major hotel chain ("Oh, BABY!!! Best sex EVER!!!"), or on shopping carts, set to go off when a customer pauses in a given aisle in the supermarket, "driving up sales" (indeed!). You might just go cuckoo for Cocao Puffs
G.
Playing Dungeons and Dragons games on the computer sort of compounds the dorkiness, compressing it, and shaping it into a monument that gets beaten up at lunch. --Tycho, www.penny-arcade.com
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Probably that those darned whales never shut up.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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.
The label on the disc is blue, and the imprint is "RCA Victor Bluebird". On the label, it says "sandy becker's bingo" and "this is a Secret Spiral Record (K1CP-5272). Engraved in the vinyl is "KICP-5272-25"
"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.
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!
Subsonic == Earthquake
Earthquake == Bad
therefore
Subsonic == Bad
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...