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..."

Standing waves..

[jasno]

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

Sixth Column

[Kafir]

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?

John Cage

[FosterSJC]

This is reminiscent of some of John Cage's avante-garde work. Here is the AMG write-up [allmusic.com].
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.

could this be related to depression?

[jasonrocks]

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?

Did this violate copyright?

[po_boy]

I wonder if they had to pay royalties to those who have copyrighted silence [slashdot.org].

Re:Less sensational title:-Bend me,shape me.

[EatHam]

It can be used as non-lethal technology...

By using very low frequency electromagnetic radiation -- the waves way below radio frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum -- he [Eldon Byrd] found he could induce the brain to release behavior-regulating chemicals. "We could put animals into a stupor," he says by hitting them with these frequencies. "We got chick brains -- in vitro -- to dump 80 percent of the natural opioids in their brains,'"Byrd says. He even ran a small project that used magnetic fields to cause certain brain cells in rats to release histamine. In humans, this would cause instant flulike symptoms and produce nausea. "These fields were extremely weak. They were undetectable," says Byrd. "The effects were nonlethal and reversible. You could disable a person temporarily," Byrd hypothesizes. "It [would have been] like a stun gun."

Ripped off from here [datafilter.com]

old idea

[glsunder]

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.

Possible "Spiritual" Relationship Too

[Goldenhawk]

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...)

Re:IG-nobel Prize for sure!

[gaeamer]

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

Binaural beats?

[majestynine]

Binaural beats (stfw for loads of info [google.com]) work by causing the brain to 'hear' the resulting frequency which would normally be outside of the human range of hearing (ie 4hz).

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)

Re:Standing waves..

[racermd]

As the other reply mentions, you'll need parallel walls for standing waves to form. In addition, the wavelength is sufficiently large enough that everyone would have *some* experience.

As a practical experiment, you can try to get the same results by using a fairly large, consumer-available subwoofer in a small room. Mute any "main" speakers and play some sine-wave sweeps. No matter where you go in the room, you'll be able to hear the sound. However, due to the parallel walls, you're going to experience some standing waves in the room. This is most observable when you place the subwoofer near one corner of the room and you stand in the opposite corner.

It's interesting to note that when you place a loudspeaker closer to walls the low-frequency response seems to be more pronounced at the expense of spatial diffusion or "openness" in the higher frequencies (the sound seems to come from a point on the speaker rather than being more diffused around the speaker). That's why you should experiment with the placement of your own speakers so that you get the right sound from your system.

And isn't the military using something similar to this to achieve similar results? IIRC, the US military is experimenting with ultrasonic waves to induce pain and nausia for the purposes of non-lethal immobilization of an opponent. Maybe it was some radio frequencies. I don't exactly remember, and it's way too past my bedtime to go looking. Pretty cool all the way around, though.

Re:Sixth Column

[DAQ42]

Actually, there is a note called the "brown" note. It's a tone that causes humans to lose bowel control (I don't know if this has already been mentioned, I read comments at a level 3 or above rating. Yeah, I'm lazy, fuck you trolls *thwack*). There are also tones that induce vomiting, nasal bleeds, and lung failure, heart failure, and epiliptic seizures in non-eplilectis subjects. It has to do with the tonal resonance on the cells and other such meat space stuff. There are a lot of things that cause sympathetic vibrations in matter. Most people are not aware of this, but if you live in a large city, the feeling you get when you are out away from civilization (like I mean, out there, away from power lines a must), is the lack of the low tonal B vibration caused by the 60 (or 50, or 47, or 78, depending on your country of origin) in the air. Electricity flowing through power lines in power grids causes a tonal vibration that can actually be measured by human senses. You can actually feel the difference.
As an anecdotal reference, I was travelling cross counrty (USA), and was out in the desert (no power lines within several score miles). It was peaceful. It was quiet. My senses felt jazzed and alive, mainly because they weren't constantly being bombarded by that 60 cycle hum of electrics around me.
Anyway.
So natch.

how to build?

[redfood]

Anyone have instructions on how to build an ultrasound generator? (Besides making a huge pipe organ.)

Re:Cathedrals and Nazi's use infrasound

[jesser]

Or check out this [borderlands.com] page which mentions the use by nazi's

That sounds scary, but do you know why infrasound weapons haven't been used in actual battle?

Infrasound weapons seem like they'd be good terrorist weapons, because you can't tell whether you've been attacked by one or not. Once the media started reporting that terrorists are using infrasound weapons, any momentary nausea could cause people to get scared and possibly more nauseous.

Re:deaf people fighting...

[Forgotten]

You are a bastard, naturally, but I still appreciate the anecdote. Deaf culture is pretty interesting. Hearing folk might do the same thing if one partner put their hands over their ears and went "nyah nyah nyah not listening". ;)

Lately I've been watching Sue Thomas, F.B. Eye. That's gotta be the only thing that could have ever got me to watch PAX TV...but it totally kicks ass, taking me off guard with some new understated observation on Deaf life every week. The people in the article need to do some experiments looking at the effects of infrasound on deaf people's emotional state now.

Beatles - Sgt. Peppers

[wass]

The Beatles did this too at the very end of the Sgt. Pepper's album. The second-to-last thing you hear (or don't hear) is a very high audio frequency, lasting a few seconds, which probably most audio equipment of the time couldn't reproduce well, but John Lennon said it was put there just to annoy your dog.

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.

Re:see Toffler, also

[Forgotten]

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.

Infrasound as a public nusance

[Animats]

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.

Subwoofers

[fateswarm]

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.

Infrasound & Elephants

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this Space Dog article [spacedog.biz] 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."

Ben Hur

[jmichaelg]

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.

NOT the first of it's kind

[oakbox]

As the concert at the Metropolitan Cathedral was the first of its kind, the experiment must be repeated to ensure that the affects are caused by infrasound and not by another stimulus.

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

The Marketing of One Hand Clapping

[gabec]

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!

Earthquake?

[Stavr0]

This feeling of unease might just be the result of evolution and conditioning, where subsonics emitted from the ground are a prelude to earthquakes.

Subsonic == Earthquake
Earthquake == Bad
therefore
Subsonic == Bad

No Surprise

[Microsift]

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...