Science Art: H.G. Dorsey: Device for Graphically Reproducing Sound Waves, 1912
Click to embiggen slightly A device from the early 20th century to turn sound waves into drawings – creating some of the first waveform illustrations. […]
acoustics
A certain frequency of sound can alter your brain. And maybe fight Alzheimer’s?
MIT News has the (low-pitched) buzz on how listening to 40 Hz sounds have cured mice of Alzheimer’s symptoms by changing their brainwaves: This noninvasive […]
Science Art: Sound Vibrations, 1892
Click to embiggen Seeing what we hear, in 1892. Did they have oscilloscopes in 1892? I don’t think they did. But they could visualize this. […]
Music from melting glaciers.
Earther has a nice look at a University of Virginia sound artist who’s turning shrinking glaciers into his musical instrument: “We’re trying to create art, […]
The sun has risen, the fish are singing….
Growing up interacting with fish called “grunts,” this doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s still kind of cool. New Scientist captures the chorus […]
Science Art: LEAF Sound Horn, by ESA – A. Le Floc’h
Click to embiggen This is a big horn for making big noise. It’s the way the European Space Agency tests how satellites stand up to […]
Old phones are listening.
Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on how old smart phones are being used to listen for disrupted sleep patterns, illegal loggers, gunshots, breeding […]
Sound levitation. No magnets. Sound.
The Telegraph marvels at physicists learning how to levitate and move solid objects using sound waves: They then levitate match heads, drops of water, screws […]
Perfect pitch isn’t.
Science Daily sticks it to the people with an innate ear for what’s a C and what isn’t. Apparently, “perfect pitch” can be fooled: Absolute […]
Lasers made of sound. Call them… phasers.
Wired reveals the weird ways nanotechnologists are making sound behave like light… this time, by creating a Star Trek weapon in the lab: Because laser […]
Why is dissonance noisy?
Nature explores the strange mathematics of yuck – the neurological reason why we find dissonant music hard to listen to: Consonant chords are, roughly speaking, […]
‘The Bloop’ identified.
I’m not sure when this happened, but NOAA thinks they’ve finally identified the mysterious underwater sound known as ‘The Bloop’: The broad spectrum sounds recorded […]
The Neuroscience of Gotye.
Fun to read Sound on Sound’s behind-the-mixing-board analysis of what made “Somebody That I Used To Know” so darn catchy – even though it breaks […]
The music of spider-silk strings.
BBC reveals a Japanese project that combines biology, engineering and beauty – spinning violin strings out of spider silk: Shigeyoshi Osaki of Japan’s Nara Medical […]
Silence! You fools! You will LEARN silence!
Technology Review cuts out all the chatter with their lowdown on an honest-to-God silence ray: Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial […]