18 ms·
Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- miguel_rdp 4y agoThe 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.
- vfistri2 4y agojust wait until amazon starts playing it on their website, (it is doable with autoplay after first click) :)
- senko 4y agoHere's a preview of how that would work: https://youtu.be/JEq10L7u3SM?t=122 https://youtu.be/JEq10L7u3SM?t=122 (warning, loud)
- thebeastie 4y agoMy tinny laptop speakers will protect me!
- amelius 4y agoSo people start dancing stead of buying?
- ta988 4y agoIf mouse over "buy now" play sub bass
- dylan604 4y ago&& if speakers are of sufficient size
- chaorace 4y agoOf course, of course. This is why supermarkets are so well known for blaring intense, high-octane dubstep at thumping volumes.
- rob74 4y ago> 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...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RajT88 4y agoBass 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 4y agoBassist 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 4y agoOne 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 4y agoIndeed, 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 4y agoI 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.
- twawaaay 4y agoSome 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...
- chaorace 4y agoOk... 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 4y agoI think the parent is saying that under those conditions, the "undetectable" part of the title may be in question.
- twawaaay 4y agoI 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.
- querez 4y ago
- jeroenvlek 4y agoCan confirm that ravers have known this for decades :)
- walthamstow 4y agoI 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
- Mo3 4y agoI can also concur, sub-bass is where it is at.
- texasbigdata 4y agoIf the walls aren’t shaking, you’re not having fun.
- technonerd 4y agoIf 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 4y agoThat's a logistical issue, not a sub-bass issue!
- 6stringmerc 4y agoDJ Tech Tools has a great interview with the maker of the Funktion1 setups: https://djtechtools.com/2014/04/10/funktion-ones-tony-andrews-on-setting-up-soundsystems-from-wembley-stadium-to-your-bedroom/ 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.
- marcosdumay 4y agoWell, 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?
- antegamisou 4y agoInaudible maybe, but definitely not undetectable. It's a journal article after all.
- posterboy 4y agoMaybe undetectable in the lab set up? To rival a rave PA is perhaps not part of the initial design goal.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago"Undetectable" is false. At 20Hz, you cross over from hearing sound to feeling it. I think earthquakes are sub-20Hz.
- elliottkember 4y ago> 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 4y ago>we believe that auditory masking of the VLFs contributed to their being undetectable. Not good enough for science.
- voxic11 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking is pretty well established scientifically.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoThat's for audible sound! One can't just assume it applies to inaudible frequencies.
- elliottkember 4y ago> 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%), and a Bayesian t test on participants’ rates of correct responses indicated substantial evidence for the null hypothesis — that participants could not detect the presence/absence of VLFs (n = 17; prior = Cauchy distribution centred on 0 with width = 0.707; BF0+ = 4.36; Figure 1F). Do I have to quote the whole article for you to read it?
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis 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 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 http://www.toon-llc.com/support/lfd_en.html
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> 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.
- photochemsyn 4y agoYeah, 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.
- im3w1l 4y agoNormally 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.
- penneyd 4y agoThe 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 :)
- bob1029 4y agoI'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.
- dehrmann 4y ago> Classical music performed in large concert halls is one surprising candidate Dumb question: what's emitting these frequencies in an orchestra?
- elmomle 4y agoI imagine it's the space itself resonating more than anything else, being excited by higher-frequency harmonics.
- WorkerBee28474 4y agoInstruments 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 4y agoAnd 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_processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Signal_p...
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
- bayesian_horse 4y agoI wonder if it would increase developer productivity?
- londons_explore 4y agoAt 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.
- BurningFrog 4y agoAt lower frequencies, sound gradually transforms from audio to massage.
- stevehiehn 4y agoThe 'brown note'
- Bud 4y ago
- z9znz 4y agoThey 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.
- hamburglar 4y agoIsn’t the ButtKicker effectively a speaker voice coil with a weight attached to it instead of a cone?
- kyle-rb 4y agoTheir 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
- natdempk 4y agoI have to say I think they did something wrong then in their testing of detectability? On a club/concert setup, or even plenty of subwoofers, you can very much feel the 20-40hz range that they are adding/removing in figure C. Something seems off here.
- avereveard 4y agoI 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.
- woojoo666 4y agoFor a more recent trend, there are now wearable vests that vibrate to the music [1] [2] [1]: https://www.woojer.com/ https://www.woojer.com/ [2]: https://subpac.com/ https://subpac.com/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- glitcher 4y agoMy 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 :)
- rebeccaskinner 4y agoAs 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 4y agoJust wait until they publish a study showing +4% increase in shopping spend when playing low frequency bass in store.
- thewataccount 4y agoIf 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.
- emmanueloga_ 4y agodon't worry, your sensitivity to all sorts of audio frequencies (low and high, and in between) will start fading soon, as it happens with the accuracy of every other human senses as we get older ;-)
- wizardforhire 4y agoI 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 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.
- ziofill 4y agoNot 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?
- miika 4y agoAsk any DJ, if bass makes people dance? You don’t need to research everything! Waste of academia
- mechanical_bear 4y agoIf 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.
- posterboy 4y agoErr, 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elif 4y agoI think most DJ's would actually be surprised that flooding VLF without regard for the beat is effective.
- soared 4y agoSomewhat related incredibly interesting reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474889
- IndySun 4y agoAs 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.
- OliverGuy 4y agoD&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/ https://www.dbaudio.com/global/en/products/heritage/j-infra/
- comprev 4y agoAnyone 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 :-(
- bredren 4y agoI shared this with my brother, a musicology professor, and he quickly pointed me to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
- calf 4y agoI try to make that frequency once per day
- _c3ag 4y agooh 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!!!!
- ofou 4y agoModern 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 https://www.thomann.de/intl/subwoofer.html
- aflag 4y agoI'm working on a follow up study showing that audible sounds increases dancing even further.
- malfist 4y agoI'm working on a converse study, showing that people don't dance in sensory deprivation chambers
- bentt 4y agoI have a hypothesis that these frequencies stimulate bacteria that live in/on you and cause them to modulate some neurotransmitters. Basically, they like it.
- elif 4y agoMaybe this explains the urge to do a little dance in the server room
- pugworthy 4y agoRun a little "less", shut down tonight?
- gannon___ 4y agoJust like in They Live
- mikewarot 4y agooh... so when you feel the beat, people like to dance? I've always wanted speakers with about a 3Hz cutoff, for this very reason. I'd be willing to do that experiment... I'd bet kids raised with headphones instead of huge speakers can't tell the difference, but I'm pretty certain I can. When you see the 15" woofer cone excursions, you rapidly learn what infrasound feels like. I bet the skill of detecting it can be learned in minutes. PS: Reminds me of the time in 1982 when we borrowed a function generator and found the resonance frequency of our floor in Sharpenberg Hall at Rose-Hulman. On of the guys had a DC coupled stereo and speakers, and I warned them to watch out for DC offset not to fry the voice coils.