[HN Gopher] Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases danc...
___________________________________________________________________
Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live
concert
Author : lamename
Score : 246 points
Date : 2022-11-08 15:01 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cell.com)
| glitcher wrote:
| My favorite track to test speakers for sub-bass / low
| frequencies:
|
| Gwety Mernans by Aphex Twin from the album Drukqs, 2001
|
| You could literally hold a conversation in the room while your
| walls and windows are shaking! Cheers :)
| wizardforhire wrote:
| I can confirm this. It's also nice to see a new paper on this.
| I've been using this knowledge professionally for the last 24
| years as a front of house engineer.
|
| Anecdotal story time: You've may have seen this video, or some
| variation of or maybe even the TED talk inspired by it...
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk
|
| ...what few people know and most don't because I have not shared
| this publicly (in media at least) is that I was mixing this show.
| We we're on in the middle of the day and a few bands had been on
| before us. By this point in my career I had already been to the
| gorge several times and the hill has always been a problem. On
| this particular day during the already frantic pace of a festival
| changeover with no sound check, the system tech is talking up the
| new delay stacks they beefed up for this year. This was great
| news and were geeking out and he's showing me where they're at on
| the console which is of course buried under some convoluted
| series of navigation and button presses to get to, given the
| atrocious UI design of digital electronics. Now generally given
| these circumstances, convention holds that the delays are set to
| some arbitrary value and the guest engineer generally need not
| concern themselves as the system techs will be monitoring them.
| To my horror were getting to the dancy part of our short set and
| I'm doing my due diligence and looking back at the hill and
| wondering whats up, why isn't anyone dancing!?! The delays were
| not turned up! None of the previous engineers that day had
| thought about them and the techs while excited had set them to
| some arbitrarily safe low level. So for me this video marks the
| moment I checked the delays that day and turned up the bass. So
| if I may add to the TED talk; if you want to start a movement,
| turn up the bass.
|
| This effect is literally everyday at work for me and why I have a
| job.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This effect is also used in dramatic movies, for example sci-fi
| and horror. It was used in the recent sound-award-winning Dune
| movie, where they used some interesting techniques for recording
| low-frequency sound, like recording moving sand dunes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KHcbp8szrY&t=257s
|
| There's also an app for detecting low-frequency sounds, although
| it seems surprising that cell phone microphones have the
| necessary frequency sensitivity. They seem to use some
| interpretation processing though the code is proprietary:
|
| http://www.toon-llc.com/support/lfd_en.html
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _although it seems surprising that cell phone microphones
| have the necessary frequency sensitivity_
|
| IANAAudio/Signals Engineer, but shouldn't microphones pick up
| everything down to 0Hz by default? For the stated sampling
| range, I assume the top end is limited by Nyquist theorem, and
| the bottom end by a low-stop filter in software.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Normally you find the frequency content by using a discrete
| fourier transform. This takes a number of data points and
| transforms them from time domain to frequency domain. It's
| basically a mapping from one vector space to another. And the
| frequency domain vector space has fixed base vectors. The
| basis vectors correspond to frequencies, and being basis
| vectors they are actually independent of the data. What is
| data dependent is how much energy those frequencies have. A
| given window size will have a minimum frequency it can
| detect. So the low frequency cutoff is actually implicit.
|
| If you want to get lower frequencies you have to use longer
| windows, and that loses temporal precision, so you have to do
| a tradeoff. In a fascinating twist that is actually closely
| related to the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
| kortex wrote:
| Not necessarily. A lot of analog front ends have a highpass
| filter around 8-20 Hz (the audible threshold). I don't really
| know why, it might be to prevent DC drift so that there is no
| asymmetrical distortion in the signal fed to the ADC, just
| speculating. But I do know a lot of systems just won't
| capture <20Hz.
| superkuh wrote:
| The larger the wave size is compared to the physical aperture
| of the microphone the less efficient the surface is at
| converting the pressure wave into whatever (up to about 1/4
| wavelength where things get weird). Electronics can make up
| for a lot of this to even things out but there are physical
| limits.
|
| It's reciprocal is more well known. To generate long
| wavelength sound efficiently you need large speaker
| apertures. In the same way you can't really use a 2cm speaker
| to generate bass you can't use a 2mm microphone to sample a 5
| Hz (70 meter) pressure wave in the air.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds right.
|
| > "All current iOS devices include built-in microphones.
| These mics tend to be very consistent from one unit to the
| next, and are wide-range. However, Apple does include a very
| steep high-pass filter (which cuts low frequencies),
| presumably as a wind and pop filter. The low-frequency roll-
| off for the internal mic in these devices is very steep, on
| the order of 24dB / octave starting at 250Hz."
|
| However developers can turn the filter off.
| Bayart wrote:
| On that subject, while I enjoyed Dune, I found the sound design
| so incredibly loud and annoying I almost left the theater.
| bredren wrote:
| I shared this with my brother, a musicology professor, and he
| quickly pointed me to this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
| calf wrote:
| I try to make that frequency once per day
| jeroenvlek wrote:
| Can confirm that ravers have known this for decades :)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| the niche bass stages at EDC Vegas were seemingly more popular
| than the main stages lately
|
| bassPOD and wasteLAND
|
| I was surprised to see some genres not only have a resurgence,
| but be popular (and improved upon)
| Mo3 wrote:
| I can also concur, sub-bass is where it is at.
| jollyllama wrote:
| On the EQ, there's a really tight frequency band, near the
| top of a kick drum, that you want to boost to get that chest-
| thumping feeling that really gets people into it.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| If the walls aren't shaking, you're not having fun.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Best gig I've ever been to was Broken Dub night at the
| Prince of Wales in Brixton.
|
| They brought in a massive sound system (RC1) which I spent
| all night in front of. The air literally felt thick to
| breathe.
| technonerd wrote:
| If you throw a party in the middle of a corn field and the
| town next over not the town the party is in has noise
| complaints, you're not having fun.
|
| God bless the turbo soundsystem at the great beyond
| festival.
| Mo3 wrote:
| That's a logistical issue, not a sub-bass issue!
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Exactly. Open fields and trees are not good insulators.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| Mountains my friend. That's the secret sauce for
| BC/Canadian bush raves :)
| technonerd wrote:
| 2nd year throwing the party they setup a nice stack of
| hay bales near the back of the dance floor. And then
| bought a double wide trailer and parked that to right of
| the stage, the camp site is also on that side.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| DJ Tech Tools has a great interview with the maker of the
| Funktion1 setups:
|
| https://djtechtools.com/2014/04/10/funktion-ones-tony-
| andrew...
|
| Great read, and happy to be a part of the "how low can
| you go" trend in guitars with my Agile Baritone LP style
| 27" scale. Sounds epic dropped lower run through a bass
| amp.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I used to love crouching at a rave and feeling the super low
| bass. At standing height all the human meat soaks up the
| vibrations, at crouching height you get the full power of the
| bass bins snaking through everyone's legs
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This makes me wonder if Muse's (the band) often bass-centric
| focus ends up eliciting the same response that is being
| discussed here.
| aflag wrote:
| I'm working on a follow up study showing that audible sounds
| increases dancing even further.
| malfist wrote:
| I'm working on a converse study, showing that people don't
| dance in sensory deprivation chambers
| ziofill wrote:
| Not to rain on the parade, but in Fig. 1-D I see by comparing the
| two graphs that the VLF is almost always turned on in sync with a
| bass drop or with the start of a new section of the song, which I
| think is correlated with people suddenly dancing more vigorously.
| I didn't read the main text, does anyone know if they address
| this?
| twawaaay wrote:
| Some people may find this offensive, but try to imagine the
| person who made the study was deaf in the low range of
| frequencies and did the study without getting it reviewed by
| anybody. Now read it again...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| They write:
|
| > _To confirm that the VLFs were not consciously detectable, 17
| new participants (one of whom participated in the concert
| experiment) completed a two-alternative forced choice task
| using the same VLF speakers in the LIVELab. On each trial,
| participants heard two pairs of 3.5 s excerpts from the concert
| audio and indicated which pair's excerpts were
| different...participants could not detect the presence /absence
| of VLFs._
|
| But yeah, not to be offensive, my initial reaction to this
| claim is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary
| evidence. Here's their claimed spectral production during the
| concert:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/SX1A3SF.png
|
| 35 Hz sound at a weighted sound pressure level comparable to
| other bass audio should be audible. They write in the full
| article:
|
| > _At the lower end of the VLF range (10 Hz), intensities were
| below the threshold for auditory perception, and higher VLFs
| were above thresholds. Non-VLF intensities were by comparison,
| much higher relative to thresholds. Given that thresholds were
| determined by measurements using pure tones in silence, it is
| likely that in the context of the music at this concert, the
| non-VLF sound would mask all above-threshold VLFs._
|
| Did they play the follow-up study at the same volume as the
| full concert? Either the VLF sounds are imperceptible and
| dancers should have no change in activity, or they're
| detectable and test participants should be able to distinguish
| their presence/absence, or your test is screwed up.
|
| We had a similar issue come up when I was at school: To deter
| pigeons from pooping in the courtyard, the school installed
| "ultrasonic" bird deterrent speakers. Students complained about
| getting headaches from the intermittent, piercing, grating
| whistle that the speakers produced. (It was like nails on a
| chalkboard...just remembering it makes my skin crawl!) The
| elderly building maintenance staff could not hear them, and
| claimed that the speakers were inaudible, that no one could
| hear sounds over 20,000 Hz so our objections were unfounded and
| meaningless. We didn't have a lab setup like the one in the
| article, but just turning our backs to the flowerbed while the
| maintenance staff plugged it in and unplugged it was enough to
| prove that yeah, more than half of the students (including all
| of the students who complained) could hear it.
| radley wrote:
| Those are the same deterrents installed in public areas to
| prevent teens from loitering:
| https://mosquitoloiteringsolutions.com/
| uoaei wrote:
| There's also a difference between _hearing_ sounds and
| _feeling_ them. It 's not clear if the participants were
| exposed to the sounds through headphones or through massive
| sound systems. I'd hypothesize that the latter would probably
| have a much, much stronger effect, just based on personal
| experience.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| They did say "using the same VLF speakers in the LIVELab",
| suggesting it was in the same room where the concert was
| previously held, using the same speakers. I'd imagine that
| sitting alone in a room and heating three seconds of
| silence, 3.5s of EDM concert-volume audio, 1s of silence,
| and 3.5s of high volume audio would be pretty disorienting,
| perhaps they played it too quietly to engage the speakers?
| querez wrote:
| Isn't this addressed in the 2nd paragraph?
|
| > To confirm that the VLFs were not consciously detectable, 17
| new participants (one of whom participated in the concert
| experiment) completed a two-alternative forced choice task
| using the same VLF speakers in the LIVELab. On each trial,
| participants heard two pairs of 3.5 s excerpts from the concert
| audio and indicated which pair's excerpts were different (all
| excerpts in the trial were identical except for the presence or
| absence of VLFs in one excerpt). Participants performed at
| chance (mean 49.8% correct, SD = 4.56%)
| chaorace wrote:
| Ok... I'm failing to form the abstract connections necessary to
| understand the point you're getting at here.
|
| Is the implication that it's inherently unethical to subject
| others to stimuli under the presumption that the stimulation is
| uniformly harmless? Surely that's the whole point of studies
| like this; to rigorously probe such assumptions within the
| relative safety of a controlled experiment?
| mkmk3 wrote:
| I think the parent is saying that under those conditions, the
| "undetectable" part of the title may be in question.
| twawaaay wrote:
| I just find funny the idea that people might spun research
| into something they aren't able to do themselves but is
| completely obvious to everybody else.
|
| Not saying it is the case here, just pointing a potential
| for humour.
| kfarr wrote:
| Red / green colorblind researcher: groundbreaking study
| shows invisible wavelength differentials influence "stop"
| and "go" behavior in motorists!
| twawaaay wrote:
| Exactly!
| luqtas wrote:
| oh finally the hi-fi market can step up and provide 0 up to
| 100.000 hz speakers and of course, composers composing feelings
| of hypothetical effects or melodies under 20 hz!!!!
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| As someone with with sensitivity to low frequencies: yay, yet
| another excuse people will use to turn every single public space
| into an inaccessible bassy sensory hellscape.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Just wait until they publish a study showing +4% increase in
| shopping spend when playing low frequency bass in store.
| thewataccount wrote:
| If this becomes a thing there will seriously need to be done
| with something like ADA to prevent it.
|
| There's many disorders with sensory issues this would be
| detrimental for.
| miika wrote:
| Ask any DJ, if bass makes people dance? You don't need to
| research everything! Waste of academia
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| If it isn't tested in a systematic, reproducible manner,
| written down, and peer reviewed, then it hasn't been proven and
| doesn't really contribute to our understanding of the world in
| a meaningful way. This is how science works. Sometimes a
| seemingly obvious thing isn't once it undergoes rigorous
| testing, and sometimes the obvious thing holds up.
| [deleted]
| posterboy wrote:
| Err, the blind control was literally gathering responses.
| Anyone can have had such an experience with inverse effects.
| It could have systematic biases and the peer review may be
| too benevolent. It is not _news_ , but entertaining, even to
| the peer reviewers.
|
| But isn't science more about problem solving? The problems
| they must have solved are how do we test this fairly obvious
| fact? I didn't read the paper and am wondering just what the
| standard unit for an _increase in dance_ would be.
| ofou wrote:
| Modern subwoofers can get up to 15HZ ( _), so if you want to pump
| up your party, just make sure you make it in a very big room in
| order for the waves to travel nicely.
|
| (_) https://www.thomann.de/intl/subwoofer.html
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, it always nice to have confirmation of well known
| phenomena.
|
| Now, can people stop designing sound systems with cutoff
| frequencies on the tens of hertz?
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| I've been chasing infrasonic ranges in home audio for over 2
| decades. You can't "detect" these frequencies in the normal way.
| You experience them by way of your physical environment being
| excited by them. _Feeling_ pressure waves move through whatever
| you are standing /sitting on can add an entire new dimension to
| the experience.
|
| I used to run experiments with friends and family using a 800L
| ported subwoofer tuned to ~13Hz with a 40Hz cutoff. Not one
| person would mistake it for being on vs off. Certain content
| makes these frequencies substantially more obvious. Classical
| music performed in large concert halls is one surprising
| candidate outside of Mission Impossible scenes. Being able to
| "feel" the original auditorium in your listening room is a very
| cool effect to me.
| ravedave5 wrote:
| Rocket launches must have so much of these frequencies. Being
| at one was nothing like I expected after listening to the audio
| of launches on normal devices.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Rocket launches must have so much of these frequencies.
| Being at one was nothing like I expected after listening to
| the audio of launches on normal devices.
|
| Agreed, I've been to lots of clubs and listened to heavy bass
| music most of my adult life. Launches are still indescribable
| and it just put an instant smile on my face and still gives
| me goosebumps after all these years as I wasn't even that
| close to the launch site (bluffs about 10 miles away): I saw
| the Falcon 9 launch at Vandenburg that made people think the
| aliens arrived [0].
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVi01wACopc
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I'm perhaps dating myself a bit, but I remember being caught
| off guard the first time I walked onto the dancefloor at Fabric
| (a famous nightclub in London). They'd put mechanical
| transducers under the floorboards and hooked them up to the
| audio feed, effectively turning the entire dancefloor into one
| giant subwoofer. [1]
|
| It was absolutely a gimmick, but a tremendously well-executed
| one. Being literally lifted a few millimeters into the air when
| the bass dropped was such a visceral experience that I'm still
| surprised it wasn't widely copied in other venues.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/ijwxsIV8Iac?t=100
| bambataa wrote:
| Fabric is still going strong! I've never really noticed the
| effect of the floor that strongly though.
|
| Dance music is definitely a lot better when the music is loud
| enough for you to feel the beat on your face and clothes.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > I'm perhaps dating myself a bit, but I remember being
| caught off guard the first time I walked onto the dancefloor
| at Fabric (a famous nightclub in London). They'd put
| mechanical transducers under the floorboards and hooked them
| up to the audio feed, effectively turning the entire
| dancefloor into one giant subwoofer. [1]
|
| I'm dating myself too by saying I always wanted to go to
| Plastic people back in those days and hear Youngsta dropping
| dubplates on SLs on a Funktion one system in such a tight
| room(s), but I had to settle for blowing out subs at 96kbps
| on pirate Radio (RinseFM) for many years until I finally got
| to seem him in the US with a Funktion One at Servante's and
| then the Blackbox in Denver, and a few more times at other
| venues on subpar sound-systems which didn't have the same
| effect.
|
| Crazy stuff happened at Plastic People, so many crazy stories
| from residents to one-nighter bedroom DJ appearences made it
| sound like the holy grail of the Underground British Bass
| Music scene. That and I was still in my 20s, which will
| always add an extra glorified lens to anything.
|
| I will definitely say something takes over at those sub-bass
| frequencies (20hrtz) on a proper system, it goes through your
| body and makes people go crazy on the dancefloor. Pinch
| articulated it best in my opinion [0]. I met him at a small
| venue in Hollywood where no one but me knew at the that hour
| know who he was and we had a really interesting about his
| label and music in general before his set along the lines of
| that interview around the same time, he is an incredibly
| smart person: he even dropped a dubplate (DS - Memory loss
| VIP) for me and was even kind enough to rewind as it went
| off!
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXZ1k3nreo0
| lelandfe wrote:
| I enjoy seeing some heads on HN :) Hello from NYC! Had
| dreams of going to Plastic, RIP:
| https://soundcloud.com/floatingpoints/floating-points-
| four-t...
|
| Tsunami is another good system in the US, unsure if they've
| been doing stuff since quarantine closed everything up.
| Analog in Brooklyn had a pretty wild SBS Slammer setup, but
| an ownership snafu caused that go away after only a couple
| years. Nowadays' indoors setup is the best in NYC for me -
| Randomer blows the lid off once or twice a year. This was
| him in 2019: https://imgur.com/a/ACocI87
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > I enjoy seeing some heads on HN :) Hello from NYC! Had
| dreams of going to Plastic, RIP
|
| Easy!
|
| I think we all did back then, we were the outsiders
| looking in and that was Mecca; I started listening in
| 2006 when Youngsta's Dubstep All Stars came out so to us
| it was pretty rare thing that few out of LND had ever
| heard of, but we eventually had nights in CA. It was
| mainly brostep noise, with the occasional UK talent if
| you were willing to drive on a weekday to LA and drop
| lots of money, which I didn't have at all back then. But
| I saw Distance back in 2009 at the Roxy on a weekday and
| went to work and slept in the parking lot for a few hours
| after the rave just to see him, but I finally got to hear
| his remix of Changes and then Beyond on a decent rig and
| just went into some eyes down thing, and which made it
| all worth it.
|
| So, when that wasn't possible I stuck to pissing off my
| neighbors with my paltry bedroom DJ antics on vinyl I had
| shipped from Redeye every 2 months from London and
| listening to RinseFM to fill the void.
|
| NYC? Isn't Joe Nice still doing/running things out there?
|
| I know the Dub Warz nights were the US' version of DMZ
| for a while, and was sort of a soundclash [1] theme to
| it, right? I saw some footage of Kahn at one and the
| dubplates he was pulling out during his set were insane.
|
| I've been out of the scene for a while now, last event
| was before COVID (late 2018 or early 2019) where I was
| convincing Youngsta to get SP:MC to Denver since Nicole
| repped'd so much talent and SP;MC is badman
| (MC/DJ/Producer), which he did later in the year but I
| couldn't make it out.
|
| I still can't believe Toast bigged me up at a rave ahead
| of Leon Switch's set when I told him I was part of the
| original Thursday night 'brandy and bass' crew as he was
| walking up to the stage and I was talking to Leon, which
| for those of who listened from the US back then seemed
| impossible but they were just normal lads happy to see
| people came. I asked him if he could drop The Fifth VIP,
| and when it dropped I ran up to the booth from the dance
| floor trigger fingers in the air and we both had smiles
| ear to ear (reminding me of this [0]).
|
| Apparently he started including that track in his sets
| from then on.
|
| Good times!
|
| I'll send you pic of my signed copy Surge/Cold Blooded
| when I get back to the US. I got it when I met Youngsta a
| few years after it got pressed. I used to hang it on my
| wall above my decks, you're probably the only one HN that
| would even know who that is let alone appreciate the
| golden era we were going through back then--talent from
| DnB and Dubstep were crossing over so much back then and
| that was the when the genre felt so free and open to
| explore what it wanted to be.
|
| Leaving you with this one, as I just fired up the sub and
| will be signing out with this [2] tonight with a spliff.
|
| 0: https://youtu.be/-HvqRzshkrg
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/ElXYoyfL-RM
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX378lVkfIU
| crmd wrote:
| The first time I ever took MDMA was in Fabric many years ago.
| John Digweed was playing. I will never forget the sound and
| the feeling of that dance floor.
| maxrev17 wrote:
| Wow this brought back a memory of that place I'd completely
| forgotten! Thanks! Haha
| pvarangot wrote:
| You can get a similar effect with a floating or semi-floating
| floor and a huge sub hanging from the ceiling. You have to
| tune it though.
|
| If you are on the Bay Area, The Great Northern had a setup
| like that on the hallway at the entrance before the main
| floor. They use VOID for their soundsystem but I don't think
| that particular part of the setup is COTS.
| leobg wrote:
| > Being able to "feel" the original auditorium in your
| listening room is a very cool effect to me.
|
| What do I need to buy to have this in my car?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Your car likely does not have enough volume to accommodate
| the required equipment. Just one of these subwoofers occupies
| the entire bed of a typical pickup truck. Two of these are
| used in my listening space.
|
| The lower the loudspeaker goes, the bigger it needs to be.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The smaller the volume of air you need to move, the less
| this matters (which is why IEMs have more bass than tiny
| bookshelf speakers, despite being way smaller. It should be
| theoretically possible to do just replace the trunk and
| backseat of a saloon and have a 2 seater with good bass
| extension
| squarefoot wrote:
| You can at least partially trade width with depth, that is,
| making a speaker narrower but design it so that the cone
| can travel farther and move the same air volume, but it
| also have drawbacks, and thicker speakers are also harder
| to accomodate.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Classical music performed in large concert halls is one
| surprising candidate
|
| Dumb question: what's emitting these frequencies in an
| orchestra?
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| Instruments that play <= 40Hz (E1) include double bass
| (either standard or with C extension), bass clarinet, and
| contrabass clarinet.
|
| Percussion also generates frequencies under 40Hz.
| mrob wrote:
| And percussion generates sharp transients, which require
| frequencies below the steady-state fundamental frequency to
| be reproduced accurately:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Signal_
| p...
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Also octobasse and subcontrabass saxophone...although most
| people won't get a chance to actually hear those in person.
| Nition wrote:
| Piano too if there is one. The fundamental frequency of the
| low A is 27.5Hz. A Bosendorfer Imperial grand piano goes
| down to C0, 16.4Hz.
|
| If there's a pipe organ with 64' pipes you can hit 8Hz. Not
| many of those though.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Plenty of organs go below 20Hz though, and even an
| otherwise good sound system starts to struggle around
| 40Hz if it's not built specifically for playing such
| notes.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Dumb question but how is the piano capable of generating
| these frequencies? I thought the strings couldn't get
| nearly long enough and the low frequencies that you heard
| from piano were just psychoacoustics.
| quercusa wrote:
| The bass strings are wound with copper wire so that the
| mass is much higher and the resonant frequency much
| lower.
| [deleted]
| Nition wrote:
| It might help to see the formula, which is:
|
| Frequency = sqrt(tension/(mass / length)) / (2 * length)
|
| So length, tension, and mass are all factors. Modern
| upright pianos also string the bass strings diagonally to
| give them a bit of extra length.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'd say timpani drums, tubas, largest/lowest pipes on an
| organ (if the hall has one), and double bass. Contrabassoon,
| the lowest notes of a piano. Other percussion like a gong.
|
| Basically, by necessity, whatever the largest instruments are
| in diameter or length. And then it's all being amplified by
| some mutual resonance with each other and possibly other
| physical structures like the floor.
| elmomle wrote:
| I imagine it's the space itself resonating more than anything
| else, being excited by higher-frequency harmonics.
| modzu wrote:
| I'll just leave this here:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
| atoav wrote:
| The issue with those ultra-deep frequencies is that the waves
| become really long and the acoustics to make them behave become
| increasingly unwieldy the lower you go.
|
| Dampening a the 9.8 meter long wave of a 35 Hz tone is already
| hard, dampening a ~19 meter long 18Hz wave mist be pretty much
| impossible.
|
| The only thing more amazing than loud low bass is _bone dry_
| loud low bass that starts and stops precisely.
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| I'm curious, if these waves aren't heard, is there much need
| to dampen them? Are we talking about to reduce the physical
| effects on those around, or is there a mechanism that makes
| these audible at some point?
| tibbon wrote:
| Without damping them you get a few problems around standing
| waves and room modes.
|
| Those modes will make it so that you have some areas in the
| room where that frequency will be uncomfortably loud, and
| other areas where it goes away entirely.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The only thing more amazing than loud low bass is bone dry
| loud low bass
|
| Bone dry sounds awesome.
|
| My frustration with rock venues is that there's usually
| _lots_ of bass, but it 's super sloppy. Everything below
| ~80hz sounds like a giant audio sludgeball.
|
| I feel like even a little bit of tuning and room correction
| (the sort one can do at home with freeware and a $89
| calibrated microphone) would help tremendously, but there's
| no appetite for that on the part of concertgoers or sound
| techs.
|
| I'm glad there are dance venues getting this right.
| tibbon wrote:
| Works at somewhere like Burning Man where there's little to
| have standing waves against.
| nomel wrote:
| Let me introduce you to...the buttkicker:
| https://thebuttkicker.com
| squarefoot wrote:
| Interesting. They also have flight simulation among the
| applications, which made me recall an old family friend who
| was a passenger airline pilot during the 70s and 80s. He also
| played a bit with older Flight Simulator versions, and one
| time he commented "yeah, it's very accurate but it can't be
| the real thing: you don't just pilot with the instruments,
| you also need to feel the airplane with your ass".
| kube-system wrote:
| That's not just vibration but also (and maybe more
| significantly) G forces.
| nomel wrote:
| Need a butt swinger for that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW-ONbO5NYU
| [deleted]
| js2 wrote:
| Child's play. Let me introduce you to the BOSS platform:
|
| https://www.avsforum.com/threads/the-hideaway-
| theater.299152...
|
| HT enthusiasts are crazy about this stuff:
|
| https://www.avsforum.com/threads/the-tactile-response-
| thread...
|
| https://www.avsforum.com/threads/show-us-your-tactile-
| bass-c...
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| I've long wondered about skipping the speaker and just going
| for a method to create long-waves to vibrate everyday
| environments. In sync after tuning it could be like a 360
| earthquake internally.
|
| If it works for microphones to catch radiant sound (as I
| learned in on-set film production) then it probably works the
| other way too (as I learned when in the booth watching a DJ
| friend plugged his headphones into the mic jack and used one
| earpiece to talk to the crowd).
| bayindirh wrote:
| You're looking for rotary subwoofers [0]. They vibrate the
| whole room.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_woofer
| baus wrote:
| I'm running a 30" woofer in a ~2120L sealed enclosure. Changed
| the way I hear music.
| kube-system wrote:
| ... a sub the size of cube 128cm along one edge? nice.
| jvm___ wrote:
| This explains why the scene in Jurassic park never lives up to
| the expectations of watching it in my friend's home theater
| when I was a kid.
| [deleted]
| clolege wrote:
| Where do you get your recordings from?
|
| It bums me out that most music recording and reproduction
| equipment drop off drastically outside 20-20,000hz. I wish that
| we could open that range up a bit more, the low end for haptics
| and the high end for the other beings in our house that can
| hear in that range (dogs, cats, etc)
|
| The new amplifiers from Purifi are incredible when it comes to
| delivering a flat response to 0hz, at high power into complex
| loads.
|
| I'm curious to see if I'll be able to tell a difference in how
| their amps coupled with their new power supplies drive my
| ButtKickers :)
| comprev wrote:
| One producer: Dillinja [0]
|
| [0] https://www.discogs.com/artist/315-Dillinja
| seiferteric wrote:
| I wonder if you could just transpose the lower end, say 20-30
| hz down to the 10-20 hz range since you can't hear them
| anyway so it won't sound bad, but you would "feel" it.
| clolege wrote:
| That's what subharmonic generators do and I've heard mixed
| reviews.
|
| Like, if you were to take the bottom octave of a piano
| pieces and replicate it on the next octave down, it could
| easily sound like crap. Might sound decent for some songs
| though?
| bob1029 wrote:
| I've got a lot of classical SACD and DSD recordings from many
| moons ago that were mastered very well.
|
| You are right that you need to pay attention to the entire
| signal chain. A bad DSP or DAC somewhere in the middle will
| make your quarter ton of LFE completely worthless.
| londons_explore wrote:
| At these lower frequencies, sounds don't transfer well from
| solids to air and vice versa.
|
| That means the ground shaking at 10 Hz (like an earthquake), and
| the air shaking at 10 Hz, might feel very different.
| antegamisou wrote:
| Inaudible maybe, but definitely not undetectable. It's a journal
| article after all.
| posterboy wrote:
| Maybe undetectable in the lab set up? To rival a rave PA is
| perhaps not part of the initial design goal.
| OliverGuy wrote:
| D&B make those awesome J-Infra[0] subs for a reason. With the low
| end extending all the way down to 27hz they really make a
| difference on a large pa system
|
| [0] https://www.dbaudio.com/global/en/products/heritage/j-infra/
| penneyd wrote:
| The visceral feeling of walking into the heavy bass at Cream, a
| 90s nightclub in Liverpool, for the first time is something I'll
| never forget, and yeah much dancing ensued :)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| At lower frequencies, sound gradually transforms from audio to
| massage.
| stevehiehn wrote:
| The 'brown note'
| miguel_rdp wrote:
| The French movie "Irreversible" famously used these kinds of
| sounds to make it even more difficult to watch in theaters, I
| remember feeling a sense of danger and tension.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| "Undetectable" is false. At 20Hz, you cross over from hearing
| sound to feeling it. I think earthquakes are sub-20Hz.
| elliottkember wrote:
| > Some VLFs were above the predicted perceptual thresholds,
| although consciously undetectable. Because VLFs were relatively
| near thresholds (that were determined in silence) whereas non-
| VLFs were far above thresholds (see supplemental material), we
| believe that auditory masking of the VLFs contributed to their
| being undetectable.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >we believe that auditory masking of the VLFs contributed to
| their being undetectable.
|
| Not good enough for science.
| voxic11 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking is pretty
| well established scientifically.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| That's for audible sound! One can't just assume it
| applies to inaudible frequencies.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I couldn't find if this is the case in the paper but unless
| they created a pure tone at 20Hz (i.e. a sine wave oscillating
| at 20Hz) any sound will have higher harmonics. Even though the
| fundamental is 20Hz, it'll also sound 40Hz, 60Hz, 80Hz (in
| decreasing volumes) etc and these higher harmonics can or will
| be audible. Besides, especially in Western classical music,
| when we use double bass at very low frequencies, it's not
| always meant to be audible, it's sometimes meant to create a
| physical effect i.e. feel it through your skin/body instead of
| your ear, similar to percussion in some settings.
| tomxor wrote:
| Yes, the correct word is "inaudible".
|
| Anyone who's ever been to a live music event can attest to
| "detecting" sound <20Hz without their ears. And it's pretty
| obvious how feeling the sound in your body, especially the
| percussive elements, would encourage dancing.
| IndySun wrote:
| Inaudible? Mentioned higher up, or lower, I can't always tell
| on HN.
| lamename wrote:
| I agree that overall the word choice is poor/ambiguous.
|
| But I think grammatically "undetectable" modifies "sound" here,
| which is true if the physical stimulus is not detectable as
| sound, but tactile.
| polynomial wrote:
| Is it really sound if it is undetectable as such? Isn't sound
| our reaction to a pressure wave (in a certain range over
| which we have 'hearing')?
| xypage wrote:
| Well animals can hear sounds at frequencies that we can't,
| so the cutoff shouldn't be when we can detect something.
| But in that case, do we set a cutoff on the lowest/highest
| frequencies that we know some animal can hear? Then we
| might discover something later that increases the range,
| what do we do then? It just makes more sense to generalize
| sound past what's actually audible, in my opinion at least.
| taftster wrote:
| Generally you say you "feel" those low frequencies not
| "hear" them.
|
| But I get what you're saying, what is sound exactly? Is it
| something that is perceived in our eardrum, or is it
| something beyond that?
| [deleted]
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| If deeply wide low frequency waves are detectable as we both
| agree, that would genuinely explain why the horses and wildlife
| fled the area around the Mt. St. Helens eruption with seemingly
| uncanny head start. Enough of a mass run that it was observed
| and noted. Just like here in North Texas when big prairie
| thunderclaps can rattle just about everything in a brick house
| set solidly on a foundation.
| IndySun wrote:
| As has been pointed out, if the authors knew what they were
| talking about they would have said "inaudible"; nevertheless, the
| article is still bogus at best. Fans of Orphx wear motion capture
| and the it appears the tracks with lower frequecies (lower like a
| regular rhythmic kick drum or bassline, perhaps?) caused fans
| more pleasure & dancing when questioned post concert. I found the
| whole article utter twaddle. Two places that I have experienced
| being bombarded with very loud and continuous VLFs (their
| terminology), and not regular rhytmic VLFs, is at a Sunn O))) gig
| and another at an experiemnt along the lines of a infamous
| Guantanamo correctional facility. I can tell you no one was
| dancing at either.
| soared wrote:
| Somewhat related incredibly interesting reading:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474889
| vfistri2 wrote:
| just wait until amazon starts playing it on their website, (it is
| doable with autoplay after first click) :)
| amelius wrote:
| So people start dancing stead of buying?
| ta988 wrote:
| If mouse over "buy now" play sub bass
| dylan604 wrote:
| && if speakers are of sufficient size
| chaorace wrote:
| Of course, of course. This is why supermarkets are so well
| known for blaring intense, high-octane dubstep at thumping
| volumes.
| senko wrote:
| Here's a preview of how that would work:
| https://youtu.be/JEq10L7u3SM?t=122 (warning, loud)
| thebeastie wrote:
| My tinny laptop speakers will protect me!
| [deleted]
| rob74 wrote:
| > _a performance by the electronic music duo Orphx_
|
| Maybe EDM fans are conditioned to react to bass sounds, the lower
| the frequency the better? Would be interesting to try if the same
| effect can be achieved with other music genres too...
| jeroenvlek wrote:
| Please don't call Orphx EDM. They make techno and ambient.
|
| Slightly related: Saw them at Labyrinth 2015 in Japan. Amazing
| performance.
| rob74 wrote:
| I'm not an EDM expert, so I'll refer to the Wikipedia
| definition ;)
|
| > _Techno is a genre of electronic dance music (EDM) which is
| generally produced for use in a continuous DJ set, with tempo
| often varying between 120 and 150 beats per minute (bpm)._
| attemptone wrote:
| I get the instinctual response of distinguishing EDM and
| Techno or any genre for that matter. Yes, Techno is
| technically EDM. But when people talk about EDM they
| generally mean commercialized electronic pop-music. I think
| it comes from the fact, that people who not have delved
| deeper into what "EDM" is, mean something like Avicii (no
| hate) when talking about it. Since that is all they now.
| radley wrote:
| The NY Times still spells DJs as "D.J.s".
|
| (AP Stylebook fixed this in 2016, but NY Times hasn't kept
| up).
| etrautmann wrote:
| Isn't edm the most general term that encompasses all these
| subgenres?
| posterboy wrote:
| It is most common, yes. That doesn't make it an accurate
| description.
| radley wrote:
| It's like bundling metal, rock, alternative, blues,
| country, and string quartets together as "guitar music."
|
| Old schoolers used the term electronica as the umbrella.
| But eventually electronica shifted to replace "IDM"
| (intelligent dance music) to mean very electronica-ish
| music.
|
| EDM became a term as EDM went mainstream, starting around
| 2010. It defines a specific range known for the
| commercially well-produced electro/progressive house,
| dubstep, & trap.
|
| From the outside, EDM is technically correct. But for
| insiders, we probably just say "dance music" or "electronic
| music" as the umbrella.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Dubstep, not to be confused with dubstep, which sounds
| substantially different.
| glitcher wrote:
| Personally I just say "electronic music" as the generic
| term to reference any/all sub-genres. Anything more
| specific falls apart quickly - even the "d" in edm implies
| danceability, which neglects several sub-genres.
| bambataa wrote:
| Electronic music has a naming problem.
|
| EDM is a specific subgenre of electronic music that became
| popular in the 2010s with Skrillex and those big mainstream
| American festivals.
|
| The most general term would be 'electronic music', or
| 'dance music', but not 'electronic dance music'.
|
| Similarly, if you say 'dubstep' to a person in the UK they
| would think of something like this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHRf9DNdkgY while an
| American would think of something terrible. (Good track for
| this discussion about bass, incidentally).
|
| 'Garage' is another one. Totally different genres in the UK
| and US.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Old-heads like to distinguish early electronic music genres
| because the term EDM didn't come along until much later
| thus Techno and Ambient being specified.
|
| if someone points it out I generally just say, we get it,
| you like neuro-funk jungle house and don't want it lumped
| in with other genres.
|
| In my experience "EDM" fans will skew more towards newer
| genre's of electronic music.
| attemptone wrote:
| I know this is probably some off-hand joke. But do you
| know some tracks that combine jungle and house? Doesn't
| have to be old-school jungle but just some breaky beats.
| munificent wrote:
| If you take house music and replace the drums with
| jungle-like off-timed rhythms but keep the same tempo,
| you more or less end up with electro.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I can't say I have ever heard that. This might sound
| weird but I think Phonk music is probably the closest you
| can get since Jungle and Phonk both use deep baselines
| and sample dub/hiphop as well as Phonk having a House-y
| bpm and driving bass kicks.
| comprev wrote:
| The Break Boys - My House Is Your House [0]
|
| Pyramid - Cruel [1]
|
| [0] https://www.discogs.com/master/39337-The-Break-Boys-
| Undergro...
|
| [1] https://www.discogs.com/release/3969233-Pyramid-5-Ft-
| Julie-T...
| jimlikeslimes wrote:
| Here's some recent ones I've found
|
| Matt Mills - Cease and Desist (Original Mix)
|
| https://commatraxx.bandcamp.com/track/a2-cease-and-
| desist-or...
|
| All Night In Heaven from All Night In Heaven EP by
| Bushwacka!
|
| https://bushwacka.bandcamp.com/track/all-night-in-heaven
|
| Luca Lozano - No Rewinds from Homies At Work by Various
| Artists https://klassewrecks.bandcamp.com/track/no-
| rewinds
|
| And an oldie that fits the bill from Grooverider:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lOvZ-1FKTMM
| comprev wrote:
| Great tracks - thanks!
| radley wrote:
| "True" jungle isn't very housey due to the heavy snares,
| but there's lots of housey drum & bass. Look for Hospital
| Records and explore out from there.
| cwillu wrote:
| I'll remember that the next time I talk to a soldier from the
| marine corps.
| [deleted]
| RajT88 wrote:
| Bass players have long said the same thing.
|
| I am sure I have read some colorful quotes on the topic from
| Bootsy Collins.
|
| Yeah baba!
| analog31 wrote:
| Bassist here. Oddly enough most speakers made for bass use
| have diminishing response below roughly 80 to 40 Hz. Mine
| included. There is a tradeoff between low end response and
| other aspects of tone quality -- depending on your
| preferencea of course.
| drcongo wrote:
| One of the first tricks one learns in electronic music
| production (possibly also other genres) is to roll off the
| frequencies below 40 - 50Hz across most/all your tracks as
| down there it all starts to smudge together and makes your
| mix sound muddy. I'm guessing your bass speaker does the
| same for a live performance.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, that's what's happening. Now it doesn't prevent
| the sound tech from feeding it at full strength through
| the subs, turning it into a wall of mud in the audience.
| munificent wrote:
| I tend to high pass most tracks except for the kick and
| bass, but it's less about mud down at <100 Hz and more
| about dynamic range. When you have high amplitude low
| frequencies (inaudible or not) then the higher frequency
| content has less head room when stacked on top of that
| giant wave before it starts clipping. Consider how at the
| limit, a 0 Hz DC positive offset sounds like nothing but
| pushes the entire signal closer maximum sample value. In
| order to avoid that clipping, you have to turn everything
| down and now the whole track doesn't sound as loud as
| other comparable music, which is bad news for something
| you want DJs to play.
|
| There's rarely any _useful_ signal that low for
| instruments other than kick and bass anyway, so stripping
| those rumbles and thumps out just keeps the waveform more
| centered overall. That lets you increase the overall
| loudness without clipping.
|
| For me, things get muddy when I have too much going on
| around, I don't know, 100-300 Hz. I high pass tracks to
| clean up the mud there. Below that, the high passing is
| mostly for dynamic range and loudness.
| drcongo wrote:
| Excellent descriptions, thanks!
| thisisbrians wrote:
| I wouldn't say the lower the better. A lot of bass music is
| written in keys around E/F since that places the root note just
| within the lower end of audible range. Most sound systems don't
| respond much below around 20 Hertz, anyway.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Also if you need bass on crappy speakers a poorly quantized
| sawtooth wave under 50 Hz can fill in the gap to an extent
| djsavvy wrote:
| Sounds like a neat trick. Why poorly quantized?
| filoeleven wrote:
| My reply is just a guess. A poorly-quantized saw wave will
| have "bit-crushing" artifacts at higher frequencies, which
| can imply the existence of a frequency that's too low for
| the speaker to handle.
|
| The video link is to a video showing bit-crushing effects
| applied to saw waves (and others), along with the audio.
| Headphone warning: it sounds pretty gnarly.
|
| https://youtu.be/Tv5c8gPYwFs
|
| See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics#Mi
| ssing_fund...
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I wonder if it would increase developer productivity?
| Bud wrote:
| z9znz wrote:
| They really should have said "inaudible" rather than
| undetectable. It is detectable (as they note)... just not as what
| we think of as sound. [edit - fix; how did I leave out words?]
|
| I don't know how common this is now, but at one time it was
| popular in the car audio world to mount "ass shaker" devices to
| seats to emphasize bass feeling without requiring the space of a
| normal speaker. I think cinemas have done this too.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| For a more recent trend, there are now wearable vests that
| vibrate to the music [1] [2]
|
| [1]: https://www.woojer.com/
|
| [2]: https://subpac.com/
| hamburglar wrote:
| Isn't the ButtKicker effectively a speaker voice coil with a
| weight attached to it instead of a cone?
| kyle-rb wrote:
| Their specific claim is "not consciously detectable" (different
| from "inaudible"), which they had a side-experiment to verify:
|
| >To confirm that the VLFs were not consciously detectable, 17
| new participants completed a two-alternative forced choice task
| using the same VLF speakers ... Participants performed at
| chance
| avereveard wrote:
| I know places that do it. One was three block away from where I
| lived. It made goddamn impossible to sleep, these waves travel
| trough ground like it's nothing and you don't usually hear
| them, but when you lay on the bed you can feel them it
| scrambles your brain.
| comprev wrote:
| Anyone else here on HN experienced the Valve Sound System?
|
| You don't hear the bass - you FEEL it.
|
| I've been to maybe a hundred raves over 20 years on the
| dancefloor and nothing has come close except maybe DVS's Wall of
| Sound.
|
| RIP The End :-(
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