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Man With World's Deepest Voice Can Hit Infrasonic Notes
An anonymous reader writes "The man who holds the Guinness record for the world's lowest voice can hit notes so low that only animals as big as elephants are able to hear them. American singer Tim Storms, who also has the world's widest vocal range, can reach notes as low as G-7 (0.189Hz), an incredible eight octaves below the lowest G on the piano."
"You can break glasses with your voice?"
"No, that's at the other end of the scale."
"But you can communication with elephants? Call them to rescue you and fight battles?"
"No, but they can hear me."
With all the innuendo around Barry White's voice, if this man can sing he'd be a real crowd pleaser!
-Matt
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Is it so wrong for a man to do the shipping report?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emh75AYxnzk
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For reference, 0.189 Hz is roughly once cycle per five seconds. Take a finger and raise it for 2.5 seconds, then lower it for 2.5 seconds.
This doesn't count as anything more than discrete pulses. I understand that the muscles controlling his vocal folds are performing similar activities to singing, but this is not sound anymore.
Between him and Mariah Carey, they should both be able to summon every animal in the vicinity.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
No, it's G *negative* 7. Not a G7 chord. As in a G 11 octaves below middle C.
TODO: Something witty here...
That's scientific pitch notation. C4 is Middle C is (the 4th C on an 88-key piano). G-7 is 8 octaves below the lowest G (G1) on a standard piano.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
We're gonna shit our pants once we hear him reaching the brown note.
var sig = function() { sig(); }
Whenever anyone says "wake up" to someone who isn't literally asleep, what they really mean is "change all your opinions to match my own, and don't you ever dare contradict me or disagree with me".
You are not an exception.
Is there an MP3 of him singing?
Oh... uh... damn...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But you are also correct that the G7 (should be G superscript 7) chord, which is the G minor 7 chord has thee notes G, Bb, D, F
I actually thought the claimed frequency was a typo in the article. But in the interview, Mr. Storm says he can sing 8 octaves below the lowest note on a piano. If you work backwords and double 0.189Hz eight times (for each octave), you get 48Hz, making his lowest [claimed] note 8 octaves below the lowest G on a piano.
As for whether this qualifies as singing, I would argue that to be considered real singing he should be using the same vocal cords and musculature required to produce human-audible sounds. I.e. he should be able to produce a continuous sound that starts at a normal note and drops down to the claimed note, without any fundamental change in the way in which he's producing the sound. My $.02.
Yeh given that every reduction of 1 octave requires double the power to have the same volume, it couldnt be that loud.
G7 is not Gmin7, G7 is the dominant seventh, which is the major chord with the 7th added. G B D F
Beyond being schooled by AC here, let me add this.
G superscript 7 is the standard jazz (fake book) notation for a major chord with a minor seventh added. G7 without the superscript is also acceptable, but you will generally see this in music where the presentation is less important than the information conveyed. Discussion forums, as an example, or lead sheets. The superscript is mandatory only in formal music theory, and assists quick reading while improvising so it is effectively mandatory, though variable, there.
"G minor 7 chord has thee notes G, Bb, D, F" would be written as "Gm7", traditionally without the superscript, or "G-7" (again without the superscript) in a jazz setting. It is a minor chord with the minor seventh added.
Traditional music theory (Helmholtz) would write C4 as c' with C3 as regular c (with nothing following it). Lower octaves are indicated with capital letters, the next lower being C (again with nothing following). Then commas indicate lower octaves starting with C, as the next example.
It is only a logical extension for the subsubcontra range to use a negative number, since C0 was really quite low and anything below it was pretty much unheard of. Helmholtz allowed for an infinite range, but as you can see the scientific notation system really did not count on notes below C0. C-1 is the lowest I have seen, which is why it is very unnatural to refer to a note as G-7.
So you are correct that G-7 is much more likely to be understood, outside any context, as a chord. But for the wrong reasons. And of course if we are talking about a note, then how would you confuse it for a chord? Unless you wanted to demonstrate a tiny bit of trivia you picked up accidentally?
I can attempt to explain two things. First, you can beat the time-frequency uncertainty principle if you're willing to be wrong sometimes. The ear does this, functioning foremost as a wavefront detector.(*) Second, most sounds including the human voice follow an approximation of the harmonic series. (Always an approximation; sometimes, it's not a very good model at all.) So you can detect the upper partials and reconstruct the fundamental if the audio in question fits the model well enough and the harmonics are present and measurable. Again, this works by being wrong some of the time.
I found an article detailing how the Guinness record was measured here. It was only measured for nine seconds; this gives us a (minimum) bandwidth of .1Hz, which at .0189Hz would be within error around 10 semitones up or 30 semitones down (though I had to clobber the numbers pretty hard with the error bar), keeping in mind semitones are separated by a factor of 2^(1/12). The transform to frequency domain was further inaccurate due to the window size, and the 2270 is only specced down to 3Hz in any case, so the measured numbers probably contained a generous helping of error.
So while I'm no expert, it looks like the the bandwidth of the measured sound definitely exceeds half a semitone in either direction, probably by at least one order of magnitude.
(*) Hartmann, W. H. (1995). "The physical description of signals," in "Hearing," Edited by B. C. J. Moore, San Diego, Academic Press, 1-40.
are you trying to wake us up to the real meaning of waking us up ???
Sound with a frequency .187 Hz is moving air at a rate of 11.22 times per minute. For most humans, that is about the frequency of their breath. Unless you are on a respirator, you yourself are perfectly capable of doing this. Also, "throat singing" can be used to generate frequencies that can not be produced by just your vocal chords. That technique, however, is not nearly as common as breathing.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?