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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 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
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!
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.
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.
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
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?)
.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.