Posts tagged #technology
Sound as a Weapon
A Sound Isn’t Good or Bad, Depends on the Person Who Uses It
Steampunk guns, Etsy
Humans mainly use sound as a form of communication, but we've also established another use for it throughout history…Weapons. Think war drums, and chants, and blood curdling screams. All were used to cause your enemy to pause and perhaps reconsider the intelligence of their actions.
Sound as a deterrent is hardly a new development but the technology has definitely grown in the last couple of years, it won’t be long before that hand held sonic ray-gun replaces mace and tasers as the self defense weapon of choice.
Vladimir Gavreau, Wordpress
Check out the first part of this Article by Simon Crab for a little insight into what happens to your body at different frequencies. Sound can affect your brainwaves, which leads to horrible experiences.
With that in mind Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) are popping up all over the world as a “safer” means of controlling and dispersing crowds. Even airports use them to keep animals clear of the runways.
Here is an in-depth look at what one such LRAD company has to offer:
It's a growing business with long range application possibilities. For good or ill, sound....it's the new frontier.
Thumbnail Photo by: U.S Department of Defense, Flickr
Speech Reproduction
How unique is your voice?
Poems and screenplays aside, it turns out not very. For all of the hundreds of thousands of words in the english language, there are only about 40 unique sounds contained within them. With those sounds, it is possible to create pretty faithful speech reproductions.
Stephen Hawking, Tech Feng.com
This technology is used for everything from giving people their lost voice back, to parodying people into saying whatever you want. The more straight forward version of this is to simply have the computer speak in its own voice. Probably the most famous example of this is Steven Hawkings' speech computer. He types what he wants to say, and the artificial voice says it.
But a newer technology allows audio and software engineers to plug in the critical 40-or-so sounds from a person's voice, called phenoms. From this array of sound snippets, almost any word can be re-created with a surprising degree of realism.
Roger Ebert, when he lost his jaw and voice to cancer, initially used his laptop with a generic computer voice to speak. A couple of years later, a Swedish company worked with him to recreate his actual voice. Because Roger no longer had his voice when the project started, he couldn't simply speak the sounds into a microphone at a studio. They instead culled hours of commentary tracks he had previously recored from various films and pulled the sounds they needed. The results are pretty great. See links below.
A similar project was done with George Bush's voice. you can try it here, and it's a lot of fun:
http://www.idyacy.com/cgi-bin/bushomatic.cgi
W Bush voice synthesis
http://www.idyacy.com/cgi-bin/bushomatic.cgi
Thumbnail Photo by: Ibmphoto24, Flickr
The Shepard Tone
Penrose Stairs, Wikipedia
We all know of M.C Esher's Penrose stairs. Everyone at some point in life has traced the steps with their eyes in a way that could never happen in the physical world.
What happens when this visual illusion becomes an aural illusion? Meet the Shepard Tone .
No matter how long you listen, this tone will always be ascending. So what's the secret? Well, it's a number of different notes separated by octaves, creating an eerie chord. Each note rises in pitch as it its volume fades in, and then it will gradually fade out. However, it's impossible to hear these fade ins and fade outs as new notes replace the ones that disappear, making it hard for your ears to focus on one note and creating the illusion of the never ending aural staircase.
The Shepard tone has been used in a number of forms of media, including Super Mario 64, songs from The Beatles, and movies. After learning about the tone, you'll never look at the Batman trilogy from Christopher Nolan the same way again. The Shepard tone is constantly used in the score and also in the Batpod to make it sound like it's accelerating infinitely. Take a listen to this montage of Batpod sequences and listen for the strategically placed tone.
Any Shepard Tone references you know of or have discovered after learning about it? Let us know by leaving a comment!
Thumbnail photo by: Tatton Partington, Flickr
First *Intentional* Recordings
The First Intentional Recordings
The first sound recordings were not done intentionally, and is the topic of another **link to post on pottery recordings**. However the first intentional recordings were done in the mid 19th century.
David Giovannoni, NY Times
Contrary to popular assumption, these recordings, done with a device called the phonautogram, pre-date Edison's phonograph by twenty years. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville is the inventor, and his vision revolved completely around the recordings. Today we take for granted that if you record something, you will be able to listen back to it. But with these initial recordings were designed to provide a visualization for various sounds in order to track loudness and/or pitch.
They were used for scientific study of sound, not for listening back to the original sounds. In fact, there was no way to play them back. The subtle etchings on a black sooted background remained a silent historical object until 2008 when modern technology was used to decode and play back these early recordings. The initial attempts at this decoding revealed that Scott's equipment was (not surprisingly) was not perfectly calibrated, and the voice and guitar that were captured played back at the wrong speed and pitch. "squawky". The sounds were slowed down to what reasonably resembles human voice. Here's one of the recordings and the attempt at decoding it!
Scott set out to record and visualize speech and sound; he never wanted to play it back, while Edison's goal, by contrast, was specifically to recreate sound.
Scott felt that it was an inappropriate use of the technology to "reproduce" the sounds. He wanted to transcribe speech as a typewriter or note-taker might. Phonograph means "writing speech".
see **post on sound recovery*** on how to get theses sounds off the sooted paper and into your ears.
Further Reading
NY times Article on the playback of these sounds in 2008
Thumbnail Photo by: Charles Kremenak, Flickr