week ten
We may discover resources on the moon or Mars that will boggle the imagination, that will test our limits to dream. And the fascination generated by further exploration will inspire our young people to study math, and science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers.
-George W Bush, speech at NASA Headquarters, Jan. 14, 2004
President Bush announced that we were landing on Mars today... which means he's given up on Earth.
-Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
-Elon Musk
week nine
"The lower sound speed on Mars does not lower the pitch of the voice," "It makes the speaker seem slightly larger, but still in pitch. In fact, the atmosphere of Mars would raise the pitch of the speaker's voice slightly, because of a density effect."
Microphone missions
Other groups have produced simulations of extraterrestrial sounds, based on their own assumptions about atmospheric effects. The nonprofit Planetary Society actually helped set up experiments to record and send back sounds from the Martian surface — but one mission that carried the Mars Microphone failed (Mars Polar Lander, in 1999), while a French mission that was due to carry another microphone was canceled (Netlander). NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander had a small microphone on its Mars Descent Imager, but itproduced no data during that 2008 mission.
Other groups have produced simulations of extraterrestrial sounds, based on their own assumptions about atmospheric effects. The nonprofit Planetary Society actually helped set up experiments to record and send back sounds from the Martian surface — but one mission that carried the Mars Microphone failed (Mars Polar Lander, in 1999), while a French mission that was due to carry another microphone was canceled (Netlander). NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander had a small microphone on its Mars Descent Imager, but itproduced no data during that 2008 mission.
Leighton told me he didn't think the Planetary Society's simulated sounds were quite right, and he sent along a sampling of his own simulations. The differences between the sounds are actually subtler than I expected them to be, except for the Titanian waterfall, which actually sounds pretty alien. See what you think after listening to these sound clips:
- A reading of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," Earth-style
- "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on Mars
- Waterfall on Earth, and the simulated analog on Titan
- Simulated rumble of thunder on Earth, Mars and Venus
- Simulated crash of thunder on Earth, Mars and Venus
- The simulated winds of a Martian dust devil
week eight
The Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir became widely known when the trend-setting English alternative record label 4AD released a pair of anthology albums in 1986 and 1988 with the now famous title Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, their recordings date as far back as 1957. The first pressing of the Voix Bulgares album was the result of fifteen years of work by Swiss ethnomusicologist and producer Marcel Cellier and was originally released in 1975 on his small Discs Cellier label. Ivo Watts-Russell (founder of 4AD) was introduced to the choir from a third or fourth generation audio cassette lent to him by Peter Murphy, singer from the band Bauhaus.
HOW TO BUILD A HAMMOCK (REPLACE ALL STEPS WITH METAL HAHA):
http://www.kinfolk.com/how-to-make-a-hammock/
- Psychoacoustics is the scientific study of sound perception. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological and physiological responses associated with sound (including speech and music). It can be further categorized as a branch of psychophysics.
- Surround sound is a technique for enriching the sound reproduction quality of an audio source with additional audio channels from speakers that surround the listener (surround channels), providing sound from a 360° radius in the horizontal plane (2D) as opposed to "screen channels" (centre, [front] left, and [front] right) originating only from the listener's forward arc.
- Surround sound works when 3 or more channels are used to send sound in multiple directions
- The first documented use of surround sound was in 1940, for the Disney studio's animated film Fantasia. Walt Disney was inspired by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's operatic piece, Flight of the Bumblebee to have a bumblebee featured in his musical Fantasia and also sound as if it was flying in all parts of the theatre.
week seven
- “Musicians sort of knew this already—that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player.”
PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows. -David Byrne
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112822247/music-sex-brain-pleasure-center-nucleus-accumbens-041413/
http://scicurious.scientopia.org/2011/01/31/this-is-your-brain-on-music/
when you meditate, you are focusing on something, whether it’s a candle flame or your breath going in or out, or a mantra or a prayer. When you focus like that, the electrical patterns in your brain slow down and relax, and the amplitude of your brain-waves generally stabilizes in the alpha wave range. But it turns out that you don’t need to be a trained monk or meditate for weeks on end to be able to achieve this state of alpha brain wave relaxation. Instead, you can use a concept called “brainwave entrainment” to get the same effect. Brainwave entrainment is any method that causes your brainwave frequencies to fall into step with a specific frequency. It’s based on the concept that the human brain has a tendency to change its dominant EEG frequency towards the frequency of a dominant external stimulus (such as music, or sound). The type of sound frequencies that are typically used in brainwave entrainment are called “binaural” beats. The way that these work is that two tones close in frequency generate a beat frequency at the difference of the frequencies. I know this sounds complicated, but it’s pretty simple to understand when you think about it. For example, a 495 Hz audio tone and 505 Hz audio tone (whether overlaid in music or in a sound frequency) will produce a 10 Hz beat, roughly in the middle of the alpha brain wave range.
week six
week five
BOOM MOMENTS:
The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy by Joel Beckerman with Tyler Gray, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 21, 2014.
The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy by Joel Beckerman with Tyler Gray, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 21, 2014.
- Sound also affects the way we taste food (e.g. sound of airplane makes airplane food bland, along with air),
- “While the low humidity in an airplane cabin and the cabin pressure affects the way you perceive taste, the Unilever study suggests that the lack of flavor in onboard meals can be partially blamed on the dull drone of the airplane engines. That type of noise makes you less sensitive to salt, sugar, and spices. But you do notice more crunchiness, according to the study, which would help explain why you’re likely to pass on the in-flight Salisbury steak but ask for a second bag of peanuts.”
- Listening to music we like makes us enjoy food more
- “Iraq was the first time I noticed it,” says U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Robert Bateman, a military historian who’s taught at West Point Academy and did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his first tour, he lived in downtown Baghdad. Sound would bounce off buildings and down alleys, but he gathered a tremendous wealth of information by listening carefully to the details of what he heard. He could tell who was fighting, who was winning, and when the conflict was about to end; he could pinpoint the source of a battle or explosion to within fifteen or twenty degrees. The sound of the gunfire provided information. “You can tell when a unit is running out of ammo, because their rate of fire slows,” he says. The American weapons themselves had distinctive sounds; the M4, M16, A2, and M249 are 5.56 mm weapons, meaning they have relatively high-powered charges but small diameters. “They have a sharper sound,” Bateman says. By contrast, the venerable AK-47, used by insurgents as well as the Iraq and Afghan militaries, is a 7.62 mm weapon. “It’s bigger around, and a deeper or throatier round,” he says. “In addition to the sound of the gunfire, the frequency and patterns of it told Bateman stories. If, for example, an American army unit got hit with an improvised explosive device, he’d hear the boom . . . then silence . . . and then maybe, after a while, a burst of gunfire, but not always. If an Iraqi special police battalion was hit, he says, he’d hear the explosion, then mostly silence, then some sustained fire. “But if an Iraqi army unit was hit—their discipline tended to be lower, their enthusiasm for gunfire tended to be higher—then they would do what we called the ‘death blossom’” (a reference to the movie The Last Starfighter), Bateman says. “Every man would fire his entire magazine of ammunition randomly outward from his perimeter. You could tell what had just happened from kilometers away before any reports were sent.”
- “In addition to the sound of the gunfire, the frequency and patterns of it told Bateman stories. If, for example, an American army unit got hit with an improvised explosive device, he’d hear the boom . . . then silence . . . and then maybe, after a while, a burst of gunfire, but not always. If an Iraqi special police battalion was hit, he says, he’d hear the explosion, then mostly silence, then some sustained fire. “But if an Iraqi army unit was hit—their discipline tended to be lower, their enthusiasm for gunfire tended to be higher—then they would do what we called the ‘death blossom’” (a reference to the movie The Last Starfighter), Bateman says. “Every man would fire his entire magazine of ammunition randomly outward from his perimeter. You could tell what had just happened from kilometers away before any reports were sent.”
- That’s when you get a boom moment. Boom moments happen when a sound triggers this kind of multisensory experience — a complex mix of memories and expectations wrapped in feelings that aren’t immediately explained by the sound itself. If I played you the sound of sizzling fajitas, then told you it wasn’t, in fact, meat hitting a white-hot skillet but rather a person burning his or her hand on a hot stove, or water from a firefighter’s hose landing on the flaming roof of a home, you would react with a completely different set of feelings. The sizzle alone isn’t what’s so distinct; it’s the power of that sound to surprise and delight your ear in an unexpected setting, then usher you through the rest of the sensory experience that naturally follows. This chapter will show you how Chili’s and others put the powerful emotional impact of sound to work to create experiences you remember. It’s about discovering which sounds at which instants make for boom moments.
week four
Notes on Children and Sound:
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics:
- Since children experience sound, even before birth, we assume that they know a great deal about it. But it is actually one of the prominent misconceptions of young children. They enter our classrooms without the development of an accurate conceptual under-standing. Some of their ideas include: There is no difference between loudness and pitch; you can see and hear a distant event at the same moment; in wind instruments, the in-strument itself vibrates not the internal air column; hitting an object harder changes its pitch; the pitch of a tuning fork will change as it "slows down," or "runs" out of energy; and sound can travel through empty space. There are also many sound-related ideas they simply cannot explain, such as how we hear.
- In its most basic definition, sound is understood as created when a wave or vibration is transmitted or frequencies are registered in human perception—in other words, both as a physical phenomenon and its perception.
- Sounds are usually classified according to the main categories of voice/speech, music, noise, ambient sound, and silence. Categories such as these can be further qualified by acoustic properties, such as volume or pitch, and other dimensions, such as rhythm, fidelity, or duration.
- Aristotle’s notion of aisthesis incorporated knowing through sensing, his ranking of the senses placed the distant senses (sight and hearing) above the proximate or lower senses of smell, taste, and touch. Such underlying assumptions have prevailed within Western philosophy, with the primacy of sight further affirmed in Enlightenment thinking, which claimed vision as the rational, scientific, and objective sense.
- Modern forms of listening have thus not only been connected to sound media technologies but traced back to professional listening techniques for “reading” sounds as signification (in sound telegraphy) and as symptoms (in modern medicine) (Sterne, 2003). In Roland Barthes’s (1991) account of listening, he establishes Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic technique as establishing a mobile listening stance that alternates between the unconscious and language, engaging both the sonorous and signifying aspects of sound
- Building on existing work, physicist Hermann von Helmholtz’s research revealed the ear as a mechanism, with a number of his instruments of measurement modeled on the ears and vocal chords.
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