Adam Norwood

Tag: sound

  • Slime Mold Music

    What happens if you grow slime mold on electrodes hooked into a sound oscillator? This, evidently. Slime mold music. Science!

    The recorded signals from the electrodes were eventually fed into an audio oscillator, with each recording representing a different frequency. By mixing the sounds generated from all of the recordings the researchers were able to create an eerie type of music – reminiscent of the sound effects used on early science fiction movies. As an added feature, the researchers report that they can cause different sounds to be generated by shining light on different parts of the mold, in effect tuning their bio-instrument to allow for the creation of different types of music.

    I’ll picture the setup looking something like a Bleep Labs Bit Blob.

    (Via arXiv)

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  • Bell Labs Hamlet from 1885

    Seen above is a green disc, wax on brass, with an early recording of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy, that likely hasn’t been heard in over 125 years. Created by Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory in the late 19th Century and sent to the Smithsonian for archiving as they were created, the paranoid Bell failed to provide a playback mechanism for these discs, for fear that his competitors would appropriate his innovations.

    Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories are working on recovering these early audio recordings with a system called IRENE/3D that creates 3D optical scans of the old record-like discs:

    Using methods derived from our work on instrumentation for particle physics we have investigated the problem of audio reconstruction from mechanical recordings.  The idea was to acquire digital maps of the surface of the media, without contact, and then apply image analysis methods to recover the audio data and reduce noise.

    The nifty thing about this form of hands-off scanning is that it can accommodate many types of otherwise mechanically incompatible media, from discs made of metal or glass to wax cylinders (quick, someone set this up to scan the Lazarus bowl!!). The 18-second snippet of Hamlet audio from the green disc above (maybe the voice of Bell himself?) has been posted on YouTube, or you can download more examples from the project in WAV and MP3 format.

    (Via PhysOrg)

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  • Floral Acoustics

    I’ve heard that plants attract insects and other pollinators using nectar guides (nature’s own user interface!), but I’ve never heard of this adaptation: the plants depicted above manipulate sound rather than light to attract attention, a bit of floral acoustics.

    Ralph Simon at the University of Ulm in Germany and his colleagues analysed the leaf’s acoustic properties and found that its unique shape produces a strong, constant echo across a range of sound-source angles. They then trained bats to seek a feeder hidden in artificial foliage. The animals found feeders topped with the cup shape in an average of 12 seconds — around half the time it took them to locate unadorned feeders or those under other leaf shapes.

    (Via Nature)

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  • Bell Labs Dial with Music DTMF

    From a 1950 issue of Popular Science, an ad featuring Bell Lab’s early multi-frequency signaling keyboard for connecting long distance phone calls, in the era just before DTMF dialtones were introduced to America’s households.

    (Via the always-interesting History of Phone Phreaking blog, which links to a couple of other good vintage Bell Labs ads)

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  • Caterpillars whistle for safety
    Visit the source: jeb.biologists.org

    From the Journal of Experimental Biology comes news that caterpillars are able to force air through their bodies to ‘whistle’ as a defense mechanism when they’re spotted by predators. These aren’t exotic bugs, either: they can be found all over the U.S., even here in Austin, Texas (guess I’d better listen carefully next time I’m in the backyard). From the Nature abstract:

    When under attack, walnut sphinx caterpillars (Amorpha juglandis), whistle. An 1868 Canadian Entomologist paper, “Musical larvae,” first reported these shrieks, but their purpose wasn’t clear.

    Jayne Yack at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and her team now show that the whistle, produced through openings along the body called spiracles, is a defence against predators. Simulated attacks with blunt tweezers caused the caterpillars to pull their heads back, forcing air through two of the spiracles in a succession of squeaks.

    There’s a video of the little guy whistling available in .mov format. I think I’d squeak too if someone was jabbing at me with a pair of forceps…

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  • The sounds instruments make
    Visit the source: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

    From a Language Log article on musical onomatopoeia:

    Ryan Y. wrote to ask about words for “the sounds instruments make”. He points out that in English, “Drums go ‘rat-a-tat’ and ‘bang,’ bells go ‘ding dong,’ and sad trombones go ‘wah wah’”, but he notes that there are some gaps that he finds surprising:

    Few instruments are as popular in the US as the guitar, but I have no idea what sound a guitar makes. There are gaps even for the standard high school band/orchestra instruments. What sound does a violin make? A flute? For that matter, what sound does an orchestra make? A rock group?

    Is there a compelling explanation as to why we have words for the sounds of bells, trombones, and tubas, but not guitars? Why do we lack words for the sounds of groups of instruments? Do, say, Italians have a word for the sound a violin makes? Do the French have a word for the sound of a French Horn?

    Good insight in the comments about different possible sound associations. For me, the question just makes me think of Eh Cumpari!, a novelty song that got drilled into my head by the overhead music system at the bookstore I used to work at.

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  • Somewhere between Mozart and Bach

    From Scientific American’s Observations blog, a report on a shared emotional code between music and speech:

    Almost everyone thinks “Greensleeves” is a sad song—but why? Apart from the melancholy lyrics, it’s because the melody prominently features a musical construct called the minor third, which musicians have used to express sadness since at least the 17th century. The minor third’s emotional sway is closely related to the popular idea that, at least for Western music, songs written in a major key (like “Happy Birthday”) are generally upbeat, while those in a minor key (think of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”) tend towards the doleful.

    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.

    Or to quote Nigel Tufnel: “It’s part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy I’m working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don’t know why.”

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  • Thingamagoop Pianola

    https://vimeo.com/4342116

    A Bleep Labs Thingamagoop played like a player piano (in a very basic sense). Would be cool to see a longer strip with an actual melody!

    (Via Make)

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  • God-Particle-Sounds
    Visit the source: www.lhcsound.moonfruit.com

    Music of the Large Hadron Collider. From Discover:

    Lily Asquith, a physicist searching for the Higgs boson–the elementary particle believed to give everything in the universe mass–is using more than her eyes. With artists and other physicists, she started the LHCsound project to hear subatomic particles.

    I’m rarely convinced that audio visualization (what’s the better term for this field?) makes patterns in data easier to find, but it sure can sound interesting.

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  • Nanothermal Trumpets
    Visit the source: www.nature.com

    Converting heat energy directly into sound using tiny electrical conductors is a 100-year-old idea for an alternative to the mechanical voice coil wire + moving diaphragm design of traditional speakers, but new research recently submitted to Applied Physics Letters demonstrates a new, actually feasible approach to making these speakers-on-a-chip. Still way too quiet and underpowered for use as a loudspeaker, but might have some novel applications in the near future as research progresses.

    I like the name given to the 100 year old invention, though: the thermophone.

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