This is a place to share research and scientific articles related to either the science of sound or the science of auditory perception – and any resulting discussion. A title description on your posts would be helpful. Older information that you find interesting is good too.
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Human auditory perception is found to be ‘strobed’ and not continuous.
The alternation side to side is really interesting. One sixth of a second is 360 BPM. This is pretty much a reasonable max rhythm – perhaps that’s why. I wonder if the one sixth of a second rate ever change and how, or is it steady? I also wonder if it is different for different people?
Does a persons hearing strobe synch to a beat? Then could the perceiving ear be switched with a phase shift (syncopation) of 1/12 or maybe 1/24 of a second? If there is a synchronization (or phase lock), how quickly does that lock in? Could you lock in to 330 BPM, or some other beat?
The lowest perceived pitch is ~20 cps or about 1/3 the time of an auditory perception beat – three vibrations per perception strobe.
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A couple of fun videos involving the physics of sound waves.
Here’s the first one, a two dimension flame grill with two audio sources, a 2-D Rubens’ tube:
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And the second one on projecting a Bowditch curve (aka a Lissajous curve) using a rubber sheet over a speaker, with a tiny mirror and a laser:
This doesn’t look like it would be too hard to do.
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Music Prosthetic Technology:
OK this is technology – but i think it fits the topic.
Perhaps you’ve seen the videos with this same guy playing the drums a few years back.
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What would alien music sound like?!
Actually this article is more about the structure and process with the brain designed to process music. But to do this the author generates his version of alien music.
This summary report gets pretty complicated, but it’s easier to approach than the original paper in Scientific Report.
My question to you: Do you ever make ungrammatical music?
I do!
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Good stuff There’s a neat max4live plugin that does this.
http://www.audiobulb.com/create/Lissajous/Lissajous.htm
It’s not free, but it’s fairly cheap.
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Interesting thread - been meaning to update my last thesis (comparative analysis of audio spatialization techniques using surround sound headsets) with a proper statistical analysis but I’m a wee bit lazy…
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For those that have access to nature publishing group, this is a good review article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2152
Cheers
Overtone acoustic guitar-string synthesis
This guy is modifying the overtones on a guitar string with electronics and an electromagnet. Skip in about a minute and the choice of overtones chosen changes, and becomes ones that are normally less prominent.
This video is from this Synthtopia article.
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Sound Design Ideas
Francis Preve presents a ‘course lecture’ on sound design. He goes through this all in a very scientific way, which fits well in this thread. The really informative part is 23 minutes long, there is an interview section after to fill an hour, so save this off and play it when you have 20 minutes or so to concentrate.
ADDED: Book mentioned by Francis Preve – “This is Your Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin (About the neuroscience behind music.)
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Well, in the 90’s I was into some Fringe Science.
I also played Bass and a Polysix in a Jazz band.
Trying to hypnotize an audience with Biaural Beats was… wrong, but that’s Jazz.
This video, and others in the series, are really well-done and shows some of the science, that gets used in the design of a panel speaker. Also pretty cool that you can make a speaker that performs this well and costs so little. (There is a parts list for these in the comments for this video at youtube.)
So if you were creating musical software to make music or for sound design, you might want a way to translate descriptive language (adjectives like: neutral, restless, transparent, brilliant, ambiguous, veiled, cloudy, supple) into some sort of software detail that is understood by computer software. One method that could be part of this process is fuzzy logic.
I found these on-line sources of information for applying fuzzy logic systems specifically to musical applications.
I went to a ‘performance’(?) of this. It was quite a head trip. You’ll have to read the artice for the science of it. The basic premise is that parts of your ear vibrate when they hear a sound. So the vibration itself also produces a sound that can be recorded and amplified.
During the perfomance I went to, I was constantly second guessing whether I was hearing the sound being played through the speakers, or ‘hearing’ my own hearing. This included lots of thoughts along the lines of “I wonder if he’s made this whole thing up and successfully persuaded the audience that we can hear the sound of our ears listening…”
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Rissett Rhythms
(It will probably take 10 - 15 minutes to work through the articles and listen to the musical examples presented below.)
An audio illusion created by changing the musical context that a beat is presented, causing the illusion that the beat is speeding up, or slowing down, or going back and forth between the two, when in fact the beat has remained constant.
Think of a Shepard Tone like affect; not for pitch, but for rhythm.
Three articles here that talk about it, but more importantly give musical examples.
Yes the example here is using a ROLI Lumi — is it a toy, or is it not a toy ?
The video in this article by Franck Tebillac on top of being an amazing, somewhat creep insect themed thing, has music that seems to simultaneously be speeding up and slowing down at the same time. Very trippy !
This last article is a little more “scientific” then the last two, but it still has some good musical examples. There is also a reference to the actual 1986 journal article by Jean-Claude Rissett, describing the effect. The first audio file in this article, created by Rissett, gives perhaps the starkest example of the effect — how fast can this sampled drum loop go ???
ADDED: Instrumental soloists reading this — keyboard players, guitarists, saxophonists, and all — This is a great illusion so that your listeners think you’re playing incredibly fast, when you’re not.
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Singing in the Brain
There is an area in the brain excited ( neurons in the auditory cortex ) that is specific for when we listen to singing, that is different from the area of the brain involved with listening to music. It is also different from areas of the brain that are involved with listen to speech and areas involved listen to other noise.
Here is a summary of the research article from Science Daily :
The auditory cortex is the part of the temporal lobe that processes auditory information in humans and many other vertebrates.
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Major and minor association with happy and sad.
Research done at Western Sydney University indicates that perception of major and minor being happy and sad is the result of cultural association and not a result of something innate to the sound itself.
Here’s a short version of the research :
And the actual journal edition :