Haunted by the Loudest Sound – The Cosmic Roar

Loudness is an astonishing phenomenon. Thor’s Mjölnir hammer as thunder is certainly convincing. It is estimated to produce 120 ~ 130 Decibels (SPA) when nearby. But it is limited by proximity, hence the old thumb rule, counting the seconds between the lightning strike and thunder gives a rough idea of how far the actual thunderstorm center is positioned. Thunder will also sound different, if nearby more like cracking, if further away, more like a deep rumble with much fewer dB.

As a kid, I was fascinated by thunderstorms. I live in an area prone to storms so in the safeness of the house I watched, counted, and listened. As I am about to write these lines, the outskirts of a rainstorm are unleashing its powers over my city, and there is also hail. And thunder farther away. It still makes the window sheets vibrate. It is the perfect ASMR.

Later, as a teenager, I was in a Rock Band, and we tried to be as loud as possible in the rehearsal room. We were, but I have no idea how much dB we reached. It was enough to rattle the house and make our ears tingle.

But we are looking for the loudest sound. On Earth, it sure is a volcanic explosion. The loudest sound ever recorded was the Krakatoa eruption in 1883, estimated to reach ~ 310 dB – enough to kill people. Plus, the shockwave circumnavigated the globe 3 times before it ebbed off. The explosion could be heard thousands of kilometers away and caused big waves up to 46 meters high and shook ships down to South Africa.

But we are still looking for more. How about we look into space? Here we find something curious:

The Cosmic Roar

It is said, in space, nobody can hear you scream. We know that space is not silent, not at all. It just misses a medium to transfer signals, like an atmosphere. Voyager I and II collected “sounds” by various means, which resulted in the infamous „Music of the Planets“ compilation record. While we know that these recordings have been manipulated in order to make them more humanly digestible, there are a few raw bits to be found on the net, and also an explanation as to how these things came to be. Basically, it was mainly the magnetometer instrument that was responsible for recording magnetic particle impacts on a diaphragm, and other electromagnetic phenomena.

It turns out, that equipped with the right instruments, it is possible for scientific balloons only as high up as 37 kilometers can detect a so-called “space roar” on radio frequencies. I call it cosmic because it seems to be coming from everywhere, and nobody has a clue as to what is causing this. It is 6 times louder than expected, louder than the signals of all known galaxies combined, it even drowns out the signals of ancient stars, dating back to (shortly after) the big bang.

Its origins remain a mystery.

By nokturnal

Haunted by the Neurophone - Another Color of Noise

 Patrick Flanagan's Neurophone

    Golden Noise and Bone Conduction

    Patrick Flannagan (October 11, 1944 - December 19, 2019) was a self-made man, entrepreneur, inventor, and author of writings that can be attributed to the esoteric field.

    His earliest invention is the so-called "Neurophone" (1958), an electronic device that gives many promises, like synching your brain halves for a meditative state, helping the deaf to learn to hear, calming, relaxing, helping to sleep, and to help you learn.

Let us quickly learn about the device:

    In early emanations, the device drove two electrodes, which seemed to be impractical, so in later versions, the Neurophone uses two ceramic piezo transducers (like in a landline telephone, really) which are also called "electrodes" (falsely so).

    The principle of the Neurophone is rather simple (hence it is easy to build one DIY-style):

    A hypersonic carrier signal, which in itself cannot be perceived by the hearing apparatus is modulated with another, deeper frequency. In the case of the more advanced (and expensive) models, there is an Aux in connector for external signals.

    The cheaper models offer only one modulation method, that of a "Golden Noise" Generator. We have read about the colors of noise here before (there are a few others like yellow or orange, but let's not get into that right now).

    A "Golden Noise" is an in itself modulated sweep from 20 - 20.000 Hz over an arbitrary amount of time. It is supposed to be associated with the "Golden Ratio", but there is no proof thereof.

    Simply put: there is no clinical proof that the claimed effects do work. One study has been undertaken but is doubted.

    Let me take a little side-step into the physics of hearing. We, humans, possess two modes of perceiving sound:

- Air Conduction:

    Clearly, the sound gets compressed into the direction of our eardrum and then translated to hammer & ambos, the rest is.. a little bit complicated - The inner ear (Cochlea and so on). So if this is all intact, we can hear the sound (while the perception of higher frequencies dampens with age).

- Bone Conduction

    Through our skin and mostly our bones, we are also enabled to conceive vibrations (musical signals, in this case). This method is used in hard cases when there is damage to the outer ear, or a Cochlea implant is required due to damage to the inner ear (which is too complex to go into depth at this point).

    So, for supersonic bone conduction a working Cochlea is needed. The contraption requires a Cochlear implant, if not intact, and a conductor strapped to the back of your head.

The Neurophone is nothing more than a bone conductor as is commercially available in hearing aids. For unabled-hearing people though, bone conduction won't work if the nerves ranging from the cochlea are damaged.

So: Many claims, but no proof. As this may come as a bit of a disappointment, the only thing that I can add is my own experiences with the Neurophone (the basic version):

Statement a) - It is a totally eerie experience

As supervised, one would put the "Electrodes" (the Piezo Transceivers) on your temples, but are invited to experiment - I tried a few places, and all with bone contact worked better. It is like an otherworldly sound seeming to come from nowhere. There is no direction, but it also does not seem mono.

Statement b) It works well for people without a hindrance

 

Purpose met or not, everyone will have to find out on his or her own. I gather that the latest model of the Neurophone, now endorsed by a German company won $1,5 Mio. in a crowdfunding campaign.

by nokturnal

Music from Ventilators - Part 2: ASMR and the Colours of Noise.

Note: for better understanding, please read Part 1 of this article 👉first.

***

If you are reading this, you may have come across the term ASMR before. ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a relatively new definition and means something like "sensory massage" or "brain orgasm". ASMR is used as an acronym in the German-speaking world; there is no official corresponding German translation for the term. ¹

ASMR Cherry Crush/youtube

However, it can be described quite well: For some people, hearing certain sounds and other auditory stimuli causes a tingling sensation on the skin that spreads from the head down the spine to the buttocks. This sensation is often described like a pleasant shiver of goose bumps, but it lasts longer and is more intense. Triggers for this include whispering, speaking or singing softly, or the sound of touching an object with long fingernails. After all, this type of ASMR video has already made it to several million videos and millions of enthusiastic subscribers on Youtube.

For many, ASMR seems to be strongly associated with this type of Youtube video - although the phenomenon has been around much longer than Youtube has even existed. A very important figure in the 1980ies was painter Bob Ross, whose quiet speech and soft brushing gave some viewers their first "ASMRgasm".

Personally, I am a devotee of a variant of ASMR that has to do exclusively with "white noise." My brain massage starts automatically when I catch a fan somewhere, a ventilator, a heater. If it's also raining and thundering and lightning, i am practically in heaven. The fact that you feel a sense of happiness when you feel a warm stream of air may well have its origins in early childhood experiences of security. Many people, for example, also love the sound and warm blast of a hair dryer - and can be incredibly creative from this state.

Al Lullaby ASMR/youtube

Analog fans and hair dryers are of course the real thing - but the constant use of these devices is of course also a question of cost. It's cheaper to switch back to videos. On Youtube there is white noise in all combinations for really every need: rain, rain with thunder, rain with thunder and fan heaters, all kinds of fans, sounds of server rooms, sounds of trains, airplanes, even all kinds of agricultural machinery noises - the possibilities are endless. Here you can choose what makes you feel good, depending on your intuition. But you can also do a bit of analysis beforehand - by taking a closer look at the "basic material", i.e. the noise.

>> For this, we will leave out all the physical definitions - there is an analogy that illustrates the whole spectrum of noise quite well, namely that of light: Just as white light contains all colors, white noise contains all frequency spectra - including the high frequencies. We know this noise from earlier times, when there was NO program on TV and the well-known "snow flurry" on the screen was accompanied by a loud noise. If you filter out certain frequencies from the white noise, you get different frequency spectra that are perceived as stressful or pleasant, depending on your personal disposition - and these are designated with different colors.

https://sleepasloth.com/

Pink Noise: Pink noise has been the most popular frequency spectrum for a number of years: white noise is joined here by a relatively concise bass sound that softens the high, "sibilant" peaks. Rain is a perfect example of pink noise; because of its soothing, unobtrusive sound, pink noise is therefore also often recommended for calming crying babies, but also for people with problems falling asleep and, on the other hand, for students to promote concentration.²

Brown Noise: Brown Noise has even less treble components, whereby here the low and middle frequencies are approximately equally intense. By the way, in the technical literature "Brown" is not a color classification, but comes from "Brownian Motion", named after a specific way in which particles move in a liquid. Brown noise is most reminiscent of strong wind or the sound of large ocean waves crashing in. 

Blue Noise: Blue noise is mentioned here only for the sake of completeness; it contains only high frequency components. This spectrum is used in recording studios, for example, to round off any overmodulation peaks in a recorded song afterwards.

Gray noise: This is the spectrum your blog host is most comfortable with; it mainly uses low frequencies. This is the sound of huge fans used in industry. Musically, Grey Noise is essential for the composition of so-called drones. 

Green Noise: Due to its mainly mid-frequency components, Green Noise is often used to simulate ambient sounds in nature.

By the way, a purely theoretical concept is "Black Noise": The absence of all signals would mean total silence - something that is nowhere possible on earth (I wrote about it in the first article of this series). 

So with this rough classification, it should be possible for the curious listener to find the perfect noise for them. What you do with it (mask the tinnitus, fall asleep easier, concentrate better, etc.) is up to you. For the pareidolia described in the previous article, which can trigger quite exciting audio phenomena such as voices and "ghostly" music, I recommend a combination of different sounds and for sensation enhancement the consumption of various substances.

***

¹

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Sensory_Meridian_Response

²

https://time.com/4694555/pink-noise-deep-sleep-improve-memory/

Haunted by Hyperacusis

And the Consequences

There is this weird phenomenon called "Hyperacusis" - it is pretty alien. It is a loss of hearing at the same time coupled with a hypersensibility towards sounds, mostly high-pitched ones.

Hyperacusis can be caused by traumatic acoustic events or exposure to loud environments for a couple of years, or an inflammation of the middle ear (mostly during childhood it can go unnoticed).

In any case, one's eardrum gets ruptured and scarred. One has a dropoff of 10-20 Decibels in the higher frequencies, but is, as said, also extremely sensitive to loud noises in that frequency band.

In hindsight, it cannot be told, if there was a previous injury that was worsened by an incident or if it was due to the incidence itself, and/or a former problem, like an inflammation as a child.

I myself experienced this. It hurt, and the day after I could not get up, because I felt really dizzy, after all, our hearing apparatus is also responsible for our sense of balance.

And all of a sudden every noise, be it the radio or the TV or talking felt very loud and uncomfortable to me.

The doctor's diagnosis came as a shock to me, since I am a musician and heavily rely on my sense of hearing. And nothing can be done about it.

The consequences are, I have trouble understanding speech and am totally helpless in loud environments. The action my left ear takes when something unfitting arrives is to shut down and make an uncomfortable Tinnitus noise that lasts for a few minutes, which hurts.

The other weird part: my right ear kind of chimed in, achieving „Hypaccusis“ - not to be disambiguated with Hyperacusis, it is a simple loss of hearing.

I created some music because I got invited to a project – I did it Beethoven-style: Deaf. I could not listen to it at all, actually.

I had let some customized hearing protection made for me, because I am a man of music and I want to go to concerts. They work pretty well, even in the hardest part for me: The handclapping of the audience.

This experience changed my sense of hearing profoundly. I could not listen to my own music for quite a while – but now my hearing is faintly better, and I am not so much afraid to lose it at all, anymore. I took up a job in the field and found balance in how to adjust volumes for me, and to use hearing protection on the right occasion.

Here is my deaf composition: https://pwgen20.bandcamp.com/album/get-this-32-tracks-for-free-a-tribute-to-peter-rehberg

It is the first track, called „Alarms“. I am now able to listen to it and have my dog sing along.

By nokturnal

Music from Ventilators - Part 1

 In some newspaper I recently read that due to constant warming, noise pollution from air conditioners and fans is also increasing - it hums, buzzes, clanks and blows everywhere. According to the article, people would be subjected to additional stress from this noise pollution and would want nothing more than silence.

The problem: silence is a purely theoretical concept; it doesn't happen in real life. This can be seen in so-called "anechoic" chambers (more correctly, "anechoic rooms"), as exist at the University of Vienna and many other universities.

 Such a room at Harvard University was visited by the famous composer John Cage in 1951. What he heard in this probably most silent room in the world, he had explained to him afterwards: on the one hand the murmur of his own blood and on the other hand the high-pitched buzzing of his nervous system. ¹ So even in an anechoic room one cannot speak of absolute silence.

This experience not only shaped his musical philosophy (and ultimately led to the legendary composition 4'33) - until the last years of his life, it made Cage not only stoically endure the street noise below his New York apartment, but become a constant source of inspiration: "Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating". ²

4'33 shows the way quite exemplarily. As is well known, this work by Cage, which is still very controversially received today, consists of a concert pianist lifting the piano lid during the performance, starting a stopwatch, and then doing NOTHING for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds.

What Cage meant by this is that if we are forced to listen to our surrounding sounds within a certain period of time, we can compose our own "music" with this material - which in the case of the concert situation at hand consists of the whispering, rustling, murmuring, and chair-backing of a highly irritated audience.

 
By the way, this is also a wonderful exercise recommended in some introductions to "composition": Take a certain situation during the day (for example, during a walk, on the way to work) and listen carefully to the surrounding sounds during this period of time - given a bit of imagination, these sounds can be put together in your head to form a real symphony.

***

Back to the „rushing fans“: If you give up the annoyance of noise pollution and try to listen to the sound of these machines without prejudice, you will be amazed at what you hear: many kinds of unexpected sounds, strange music, human voices and more. This can also become quite irritating in between.

The reason for this lies in the so-called Clustering Illusion, which, according to its definition, "describes the human property of attributing meaning to random patterns that inevitably occur in sufficiently large amounts of data." ³ A variant of this is so-called Pareidolia - the dubious ability of our hyperactive brains to immediately recognize some kind of meaning in what we consider disordered environments like this.

Hasn't everyone seen a face in the irregularities of a wall? Recognizing faces in random structures is a perfect example of pareidolia and, as in the case of the "Martian face," can even go around the world as a headline. Pareidolia can also be used as an explanation for just about all "ghost photos" that circulate on the Internet and are not deliberately faked anyway.

Of course, the whole thing works also on the level of hearing: Here, too, our brain tries to filter out something familiar to us from the disordered patterns of a sound - this then ranges from the slight audio hallucinations described earlier to the "heavenly music" received from supernatural forces to the "dead" speaking to us from the beyond via radio or to the so-called "reversals" said to have been discovered when playing popular songs backwards.

By the way, the meanings of these phenomena ascribed by esotericists and conspiracy theorists can be demystified quite easily: Unless you are told beforehand what you are going to hear (a mandatory practice in such circles) and your brain then dutifully confirms this interpretation, you will hear only what these alleged phenomena really are - a purely random arrangement of weird sounds.

Incidentally, in the case of the described Pareidolia, there is also a close relationship to the so-called Apophenia - a symptom of schizophrenia in which perceptions in random patterns begin to take on a personal level of meaning. If that is the case, it is very urgent to do something about your own mental health. We all know one or the other tragic case of "personal messages" being transmitted to a mentally ill person via the radio, TV or other media; in almost all cases, this is a relatively sure sign of psychosis.

However, this should not stop us from listening to nice music from fans. At least the stress level regarding ambient noise can be wonderfully reduced or decreased. In fact, there is already a real industry that has assimilated the phenomena of ASMR and White Noise - but that is the subject of the next part, which you can read here soon.

 ***

¹ https://kirkville.com/john-cage-and-the-anechoic-chamber/

² John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan 50th Anniversary Edition, 2013.

³ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering-Illusion

Haunted by the Kunstkopf

A „Kunstkopf“ is also called a „Dummy head“. I prefer the first term.

It is a very intriguing recording device, available in the upper 4 digits EUR class if you are in need of one carved out of wood...

In modern installations, the actual head is represented by special X-aligned condenser microphones.

Before, there are wood, styrofoam & vinyl heads with inbuilt condenser microphones which allow for binaural recordings, „real stereo“, as we understand it.

Various artists, like CAN used it in their studio sessions as a recording device instead of standard microphones, since the studio seemed too sterile, too exact. With the artificial head, one could make recordings that could be perceived as if actually sitting in the natural stereo field.

Mostly, this device found a home in Radio Plays.

A very enchanting short demonstration is to be found on YT (in German):

by nokturnal

Haunted by the Dynamophone

 At a Certain Point, a man had a haunting Idea about broadcasting Sound:

Thaddeus Cahill: Electric Music

Let's quickly describe the device he imagined first, the Telharmonium:

Cahill built a large, quite a few tons heavy transformer bank (The Mark I weighed 7 tons. The Mark II weighed almost 200 tons). It is considered the first electromechanical musical instrument dating from c. 1896. Electric tubes were neither invented than transistors, so this was the only contraption he could use to generate electric music sounds. He considered it as an electric organ.

As amplifiers also were not invented yet, he invented some kind of loudspeakers (basically horns with an electrically driven diaphragm, today known as "Tweeter") for live performances, which were attended and received quite well, for example by Mark Twain.

Cahill also seems to be the inventor of additive synthesis, as he added so-called "color wheels" to his contraption, which did the job.

But then, Thaddeus Cahill developed another, revolutionary idea:

He wanted to distribute his electrical signal to people out there. So, since radio was still in its diapers the only possible network was: 

Phone lines, powered by his second device, called the "Dynamophone"

It got advertised in newspapers when transmissions would be available, so one could dial in and pick up the receiver at the right time.

There are no recordings available of the devices, nor tangible remains. The devices were too heavy, and quickly overcome, by more simple and less energy-consuming devices.

It can be said, Thaddeus Cahill's machines caused a lot of "Crosstalk" along the not yet shielded phone lines. So one having a phone conversation could have easily been overtaken by outer worldly sounds.

Last but least, for sure, this must be the first known synthesizer, with a commercial streaming service attached.

by nokturnal

Muzak, Mallsoft

 Music, this wonderful entity, often takes on a consciousness of its own; triggered by human and non-human intervention, a stream of audio particles flows out of a source - and seeps away from the noted auditory presence into the cracks of other fault lines as well, for these cracks and crevices of the mainstream are often full of mysterious signals that develop their own unconscious agendas unnoticed at the margins. These audio particles then often lie unnoticed in invisible breeding stations for long periods of time before being attracted to a new event. 

In the climate of the cold war after 1945, especially in the USA, the strangest creative blossoms emerged, most of which had nothing particularly good in mind - for example "Background Music", later also known under the brand names "Muzak" and "Seeberg", or quite hip "Elevator Music". "Background" is the most important term here, because behind purring orchestras, whining violins and extra-lascivious voices was a scientifically proven recipe - namely, to brainwash larger gatherings of people in a nasty way. Not particularly flashy - after all, you didn't want an assassin, but happy-brainless work and leisure zombies. 

These groups of people (e.g. the employees of a company, or factory workers) became test subjects without ever having signed a contract; without them noticing it, their consciousness was stolen, and returned to them in an altered form.

At some point the unfortunates had no feelings of their own anymore, only Pavlovian reactions to events that were given to them in a gentle way. Perhaps this is how the great callousness began, the lack of empathy with other human beings in this horrible modern age a zombie has no personal feelings.

But then, the annoying background droning was simply turned off and replaced by radio stations - which, of course, again fit into the psychological-musical scheme. But "Muzak" in its antiquated guise no longer mattered.

Nothing happened for many years.

Then came Vaporwave.

Vaporwave, this indeterminable giant entity, which is oddball to Western ears, but has a gigantic millionaire life in Asia. And this huge blob of wacky ideas has at least about 50 subgenres, which may sometimes amaze the connoisseur in their radicalism.

From the idea "Vaporwave", just like "Muzak", is not music to enjoy. But instead of shuffling zombies the apocalypse has happened here long ago. You can often tell that from the postings on various scene pages - the shimmering cocoon consists in truth of boundless contempt. Well and honestly meant nostalgia waves like "synthwave" or "chillwave" have finally turned into the ultimate rejection, the caricature of all former consumer values. For example, the genre "Mallsoft": to very strangely recreated "Muzak" of the 1980s we see only a picture of an abandoned shopping mall, where the electricity and escalators still work; but nothing is transported except dust and bad thoughts from the old days. 

Thus, as a listener, one has lost on all corners - even what one did not like is now gone. Turbo capitalism has died, in dilapidated temples of consumption it still babbles on like an idiot... and we are condemned to listen to this prolonged death throes over and over again from the beginning.

by Doc Nachtstrom

Haunted by Northern Lights

Sun Wind

Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis are mostly a spectacular visual appearance in green or amber up in the polar regions (there are also Southern Lights towards the South Pole, but are not as easily accessible).

While one must be lucky to see Northern Lights on a trip covering parts of Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Finland, or Norway, one must be even luckier to be able to listen to them! It is a mostly unexplained phenomenon, but it is possible, as a team of researchers confirmed and recorded it in 2016.

It has been mused and theorized that the Auroras could also be heard for a long time already. Let us quickly explain what they are:

What is called Solar Wind, and a mass of other particles from outer space, bombard our earth continuously. But since we have the luck to have a magnetic field coming with our planet, these potentially harmful loads don't land on our heads but get swirled around the magnetic poles. Thanks, Mother Earth!

The applied magnetic inter-charge covers all the mysterious and beautiful lights. They even dance, as NASA is telling us! According to the periodical changes in earth's magnetic field, so do the Aurora displays change. They are interlinked.

But for almost centuries, there remained the question, "Can we also hear them?".

As said, "Yes, We Can". Little was known of the composition of the Auroras, so for long times only myths and tales remained. But there was little doubt that they can be listened to, as well.

While mentioned by Galileo in 1619, they have been known forever, have been depicted in cave paintings in 30,000 BC, and were recorded by a Babylonian astronomer around 600 BC.

So finally, in 2016 a team of researchers was able to make recordings using special equipment. It sounds rather eerie, like snaps of a whip, but seems to make sense when one imagines that lightning can also go upwards direction.

Anyway, the acoustic phenomena will happen around seventy meters above our heads, so it is not that farsighted to think of that for the Vikings, they were the shimmering reflections of the armor of the Valkyries sent by Odin to collect the bodies of the warriors slain in battle, while in Finland fire foxes traveled through the sky so quickly that their tails produced sparks as they brushed the mountains.

The skies sound eerie.

By nokturnal