Posts tagged frequency
The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to anyone, but a study in the June issue of Emotion suggests the minor third isn’t a facet of musical communication alone—it’s how we convey sadness in speech too. When it comes to sorrow, music and human speech might speak the same language.
Meagan Curtis of Tufts University’s Music Cognition Lab recorded undergraduate actors reading two-syllable lines—like “let’s go” and “come here”—with different emotional intonations: anger, happiness, pleasantness and sadness. She then used a computer program to analyze the recorded speech and determine how the pitch changed between syllables. Since the minor third is defined as a specific measurable distance between pitches (a ratio of frequencies), Curtis was able to identify when the actors’ speech relied on the minor third. What she found is that the actors consistently used the minor third to express sadness.
You have to listen to the audio samples of two-word phrases they analyzed for musical intervals.
(via Scientific American)
Music for Dogs
Laurie Anderson is putting on a high-frequency concert for dogs:
The recital, called “Music for Dogs,” is being presented as part of Sydney’s Vivid LIVE arts festival, which is being curated by Ms. Anderson and her husband, Lou Reed. Announcing the dog-friendly composition at a news conference, Ms. Anderson explained that at a previous event, she thought: “Wouldn’t it be great, if you were playing a concert and you look out and you see all dogs? And so I said, ‘If I ever I get the chance to do something like that I would do it.’”
From the recital website:
Laurie Anderson has composed a 20 minute work especially for the hearing range of dogs – who can hear frequencies far outside the human audio spectrum. Taking the idea of the apparently inaudible dog whistle to new artistic heights, our canine friends will be treated to a glorious cacophony of sound, while all we will hear is the lapping of the water on the harbour.
Awesome.
edit to add: Somehow I missed this part (which enhances the awesomeness even further):
The festival will also present a performance based on “Metal Machine Music,” the challenging 1975 album released by Mr. Reed, as well as a soul music program and free martial arts lessons.
(via artsbeat)
If high frequencies are good for keeping away unruly teenagers, then low frequencies are good for keeping away hail storms. (Maybe.)
In the video, you can hear a hail cannon in action. (I kind of wish that link was a game based on hail cannons, not just a flash animation.)
See more pictures from a hail cannon supplier here.
(via nacken)
Wouldn’t have thought I’d be posting unboxing videos to the blog, but this one is of one of those mosquito devices. Worth clicking ahead to the end to see what they look like, if you’re not a big fan of cardboard boxes, tapes, and packing peanuts.
And it looks like the wikipedia page on “the mosquito” has a lot more information on it than the last time I looked. (It’s called the “Beethoven” in France, and the “Swiss-Mosquito” in Switzerland? Really??)
(via mediateletipos)
Frequency Sweepers
The recent post over at wayne&wax on “treble culture” got me thinking back to a subject we talked about on the first day of my sound class this summer: mediation and frequency filtering.
Roughly speaking, human hearing ranges from 20Hz to 20 kHz (not usually that high, especially as you age, but that range is easy to remember). Within that range, you can hear certain frequencies better or worse than others (“better or worse” usually just referring to the perceived loudness of a given frequency). But, to re-quote Raymond Scott from an earlier post:
The composer must bear in mind that the radio listener does not hear music directly. He hears it only after the sound has passed through a microphone, amplifiers, transmission lines, radio transmitter, receiving set, and, finally, the loud speaker apparatus itself.
Each of these steps is a mediation, and with each and every mediation come changes. The fun part of being a student of media is the cultural/social/musical/etc. side of mediation, but there is a more physical result of mediation as well: each step changes the frequency makeup of the sounds that pass through it.
Microphones pick up (or don’t pick up) certain sounds, amplifiers emphasize or de-emphasize certain sounds, and so on. Wayne is interested in the results of a particular chain of mediation—the kind that ends up on a cell phone, lo-fi speakers, or other treble-y playback devices. These cultural devices affect how music is produced and vice versa.
Leaving the ethnomusicology to the ethnomusicologists, I want to share some videos I’ve found recently that are completely fascinating from the perspective of mediation as frequency filtering: sine sweeps.
There are a whole bunch of these videos on YouTube. People typically run a sine wave sweep on their sound systems to demonstrate an even frequency response; that is, at every frequency, you’ll hear roughly the same volume. Drops in volume indicate imperfect frequency response.
There is, of course, some irony in putting these videos on YouTube in the service of evidence. Editing Scott a little, it’s not hard to hear what changes result from the transmission of the sine sweep from the speakers, to the video camera, through the YouTube compression algorithms, through your computer speakers or headphones.
Even sine sweeps delivered directly to YouTube fall victim to aliasing (listen to the repeating rise towards the end of the clip, and watch out, it gets loud):
It’s worth following this vid to the actual page to read people’s comments about what sounds are and are not audible:
Taking sound frequencies within the range of human hearing over a short period of time we rendered them in a tangible and permanent manner, as sculptures representing a sample of time.(via generator.x)
