[lyrics, music] Sounds of Silence
Is the affinity for music innate?
Michael Kanellos
http://news.com.com/Is+the+affinity+for+music+innate/2100-1008_3-5836298.html
August 17, 2005, 5:21 AM PDT
Do we learn to love music, or is it innate? An Internet-based study being conducted by two MIT students may help answer that question.
The Music Universals Study, created by doctoral students Mary Farbood and Josh McDermott, is an effort to determine to what degree musical appreciation is a factor of culture versus an innate part of human behavior. In the study, Web participants listen to different sounds and then answer questions about them. Was the chord pleasing or annoying? Did it make you happy or sad?
The responses of people from various cultures will then be compared for differences and similarities.
"There is a lot (in music appreciation) that is learned. That much is clear. What is less clear is what is shared," McDermott said. "With the Internet, we've got a new tool to probe people."
Ideally, the study could provide fodder for the long-running cultural debate about the nature of music and the widespread appeal of many pieces of music, such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
But the results could also help fill in gaps in scientists' knowledge about human evolutionary history. If some sound combinations have universal appeal, it could turn out that our reactions are rooted in the genetic code. If so, a new question emerges: What stimulated humans to evolve to hear music?
"There is a lot of speculation that music may have piggybacked on language," McDermott said.
Getting a broad sample will likely be one of the principle obstacles of the study, which kicked off about six weeks ago. The study is currently being conducted only in English, but it will soon be available in Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish and possibly Arabic. Most respondents so far are from North America.
Conducting the survey over the Internet rather than through a field study also likely means that many of the overseas responses could come from people who are more familiar with Western music than the average person living there. A field study, however, would be impractical, and even with an online study the data could still show how or whether reactions to different combinations of notes or sounds remains independent of culture.
The test takes about five minutes. The first set of questions ask an individual to choose which of two sounds is more pleasing than the other, using a seven-point scale. In the second battery, a sound is played, and participants--again, using a scale--grade whether the sound made them happy or sad.
A third set of questions ask listeners whether they think a string of sounds or musical notes seems to be "going somewhere." Subjects are asked to choose from a series of pictures that indicate that tension is increasing, decreasing, staying constant or following some other pattern. This portion of the test is the only one that uses sets of sequential sounds, rather than individual sounds.
Both McDermott and Farbood have been involved in other research.
McDermott has conducted studies on the reactions of monkeys to music. So far, he's found that music doesn't soothe the savage beast. Although monkeys can recognize tempo changes, they don't discriminate between sounds that are pleasing or dissonant to us. "This suggests that a lot of music perception is unique to humans," he said.
A few years ago, Farbood created HyperScore, a PC application that helps individuals compose music through graphics. Among the compositions created using the application was "Creepy Raindrops," by then 10-year-old Chelsea O'Hara. The piece was later performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as part of the experiment.
Paul Simon--Sounds of Silence
Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence
"Fools" said I "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grow
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said "The words of the prophets are written on subway walls
And tenement halls
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence
If these walls could talk, they would whisper
Oli Usher
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1546178,00.html
Thursday August 11, 2005
Scientists wishing to explore sound must first find complete silence, in a noise pollution-free anechoic chamber. Oli Usher investigates
Silence holds a paradoxical place in science and in human consciousness. In science, the quietest conditions that modern technology allow are invariably used to research sound. And our own search for "peace and quiet" never extends as far as wanting no noise at all. Real silence is strange and disturbing, not relaxing. Most people cannot sleep without at least some background sound.
The closest humankind can get to complete silence is the inside of a heavily soundproofed anechoic chamber, a handful of which exist in universities and labs across Britain. These are used for a range of interesting research - but they also have a profound effect on the people who go into them.
My search for one leads me to University College London, whose anechoic ("without echo") room is in an anonymous, windowless building. In one of the busiest parts of campus, and next to the low hum of an electricity substation, it is hard to believe the unassuming walls can block out all sounds. Dave Cushing, a technician in the phonetics and linguistics department, which owns the facility, shows me the stacks of equipment used in the chamber, and the extensive precautions taken to keep sound pollution inside to a minimum.
Stepping into the chamber is a strange experience, "like being in a field in the middle of the night" according to John Fithyan who runs Southampton University's facility. The silence is profound and the room looks unusual too, with jagged sound-cancelling spikes covering the walls and ceiling that take on a menacing look in the dim light. A 70s-style padded armchair sits incongruously in this other-worldly environment. As I sit on the chair, I try to speak. My voice sounds quiet and dead, and yet I am conscious of the sound of my breathing. As I hold my breath and try to experience the silence without the sound of my breath, I begin to hear a whistling noise in my ears. The experience is disconcerting.
Unpleasant or not, complete silence is incredibly difficult to achieve. Insulate a room, build it within thick brick walls, and vibrations will still get in. Mount the whole thing on springs, and the vibrations will stop - but the echoes won't. Anechoic chambers eliminate this problem by covering walls, ceiling and floor with wedges of fibreglass which stick out 18in into the room. These absorb virtually all the sound, meaning that measurements of sound levels typically weigh in far below zero decibels, the threshold of human hearing. The Bell Labs chamber, the first ever built, featured in the Guinness Book of Records as the "quietest place on earth" after its construction in 1940.
Once you have a silent room, you don't want to ruin it. So the chamber at UCL has specially designed silent air conditioning, and the walls contain coils to cancel out the hum of the substation. The chamber is lit with light bulbs instead of noisy fluorescent tubes. And users must walk on a platform, raised above the soundproofed floor. Even the steel door is covered with a foot and a half of fibreglass.
While most anechoic chambers are used for acoustic research, UCL's is used in phonetics - the scientific study of the human voice. Researchers make precise recordings of voices, using both microphones and laryngographs. This latter device, developed by one of the academics who used this chamber, measures the opening and closing of the voice box while the subject speaks. Linguists at UCL use the recordings to identify the root causes of speech abnormalities in children.
Another device in the crowded control room is a spectrum analyser. "The spectrum analyser looks at the different frequencies in a voice," Cushing says. Using high-quality digital recordings, researchers employ the analyser to examine the minute details of speech, furthering our understanding of human expression. Other research in the department has investigated the hearing of people who have had ear surgery.
Elsewhere, scientists and engineers mainly use anechoic rooms for routine acoustic research, such as testing equipment and modelling sound propagation. But one complex technology developed in the chamber features finds a practical application in the nation's living rooms. "Head-related transfer functions" (HRTFs) underpin the surround sound effects in many computer games. Audio systems using this technology create their 3D sound effects using only a pair of normal stereo speakers. The illusion is created using a detailed acoustic model of the human head, developed in an anechoic chamber, to subtly tweak the sound so as to mimic the realism of five-speaker systems.
The silence of the anechoic room has inspired musicians, too. The American composer John Cage visited Harvard University's facility in the late 1940s. Though he was in a room with no background sound and no echo, Cage discovered that total silence is not actually possible: he claims he heard two sounds, "one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation". After this experience, he was inspired to write his "silent" piece, 4'33", in which the "music" is made by the ambient sounds of the concert hall alone.
Some people, standing in an anechoic chamber, have lost their balance. Professor Linda Luxon, an audiologist at the Institute of Child Health, questions why this might be. "I can't give you any rational explanation of why people would lose their balance in an anechoic chamber," she says. But she does agree that people find orientation easier if they have full use of all five senses.
As I step out of the anechoic chamber and back into the control room, my sensory deprivation ends. Before going into the chamber, I had thought the control room was quiet, but I now hear the fans of the computer systems, the echoes of students chatting outside. The shock of hearing all this is as great as was the shock of hearing nothing.
Michael Kanellos
http://news.com.com/Is+the+affinity+for+music+innate/2100-1008_3-5836298.html
August 17, 2005, 5:21 AM PDT
Do we learn to love music, or is it innate? An Internet-based study being conducted by two MIT students may help answer that question.
The Music Universals Study, created by doctoral students Mary Farbood and Josh McDermott, is an effort to determine to what degree musical appreciation is a factor of culture versus an innate part of human behavior. In the study, Web participants listen to different sounds and then answer questions about them. Was the chord pleasing or annoying? Did it make you happy or sad?
The responses of people from various cultures will then be compared for differences and similarities.
"There is a lot (in music appreciation) that is learned. That much is clear. What is less clear is what is shared," McDermott said. "With the Internet, we've got a new tool to probe people."
Ideally, the study could provide fodder for the long-running cultural debate about the nature of music and the widespread appeal of many pieces of music, such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
But the results could also help fill in gaps in scientists' knowledge about human evolutionary history. If some sound combinations have universal appeal, it could turn out that our reactions are rooted in the genetic code. If so, a new question emerges: What stimulated humans to evolve to hear music?
"There is a lot of speculation that music may have piggybacked on language," McDermott said.
Getting a broad sample will likely be one of the principle obstacles of the study, which kicked off about six weeks ago. The study is currently being conducted only in English, but it will soon be available in Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish and possibly Arabic. Most respondents so far are from North America.
Conducting the survey over the Internet rather than through a field study also likely means that many of the overseas responses could come from people who are more familiar with Western music than the average person living there. A field study, however, would be impractical, and even with an online study the data could still show how or whether reactions to different combinations of notes or sounds remains independent of culture.
The test takes about five minutes. The first set of questions ask an individual to choose which of two sounds is more pleasing than the other, using a seven-point scale. In the second battery, a sound is played, and participants--again, using a scale--grade whether the sound made them happy or sad.
A third set of questions ask listeners whether they think a string of sounds or musical notes seems to be "going somewhere." Subjects are asked to choose from a series of pictures that indicate that tension is increasing, decreasing, staying constant or following some other pattern. This portion of the test is the only one that uses sets of sequential sounds, rather than individual sounds.
Both McDermott and Farbood have been involved in other research.
McDermott has conducted studies on the reactions of monkeys to music. So far, he's found that music doesn't soothe the savage beast. Although monkeys can recognize tempo changes, they don't discriminate between sounds that are pleasing or dissonant to us. "This suggests that a lot of music perception is unique to humans," he said.
A few years ago, Farbood created HyperScore, a PC application that helps individuals compose music through graphics. Among the compositions created using the application was "Creepy Raindrops," by then 10-year-old Chelsea O'Hara. The piece was later performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as part of the experiment.
Paul Simon--Sounds of Silence
Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence
"Fools" said I "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grow
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said "The words of the prophets are written on subway walls
And tenement halls
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence
If these walls could talk, they would whisper
Oli Usher
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1546178,00.html
Thursday August 11, 2005
Scientists wishing to explore sound must first find complete silence, in a noise pollution-free anechoic chamber. Oli Usher investigates
Silence holds a paradoxical place in science and in human consciousness. In science, the quietest conditions that modern technology allow are invariably used to research sound. And our own search for "peace and quiet" never extends as far as wanting no noise at all. Real silence is strange and disturbing, not relaxing. Most people cannot sleep without at least some background sound.
The closest humankind can get to complete silence is the inside of a heavily soundproofed anechoic chamber, a handful of which exist in universities and labs across Britain. These are used for a range of interesting research - but they also have a profound effect on the people who go into them.
My search for one leads me to University College London, whose anechoic ("without echo") room is in an anonymous, windowless building. In one of the busiest parts of campus, and next to the low hum of an electricity substation, it is hard to believe the unassuming walls can block out all sounds. Dave Cushing, a technician in the phonetics and linguistics department, which owns the facility, shows me the stacks of equipment used in the chamber, and the extensive precautions taken to keep sound pollution inside to a minimum.
Stepping into the chamber is a strange experience, "like being in a field in the middle of the night" according to John Fithyan who runs Southampton University's facility. The silence is profound and the room looks unusual too, with jagged sound-cancelling spikes covering the walls and ceiling that take on a menacing look in the dim light. A 70s-style padded armchair sits incongruously in this other-worldly environment. As I sit on the chair, I try to speak. My voice sounds quiet and dead, and yet I am conscious of the sound of my breathing. As I hold my breath and try to experience the silence without the sound of my breath, I begin to hear a whistling noise in my ears. The experience is disconcerting.
Unpleasant or not, complete silence is incredibly difficult to achieve. Insulate a room, build it within thick brick walls, and vibrations will still get in. Mount the whole thing on springs, and the vibrations will stop - but the echoes won't. Anechoic chambers eliminate this problem by covering walls, ceiling and floor with wedges of fibreglass which stick out 18in into the room. These absorb virtually all the sound, meaning that measurements of sound levels typically weigh in far below zero decibels, the threshold of human hearing. The Bell Labs chamber, the first ever built, featured in the Guinness Book of Records as the "quietest place on earth" after its construction in 1940.
Once you have a silent room, you don't want to ruin it. So the chamber at UCL has specially designed silent air conditioning, and the walls contain coils to cancel out the hum of the substation. The chamber is lit with light bulbs instead of noisy fluorescent tubes. And users must walk on a platform, raised above the soundproofed floor. Even the steel door is covered with a foot and a half of fibreglass.
While most anechoic chambers are used for acoustic research, UCL's is used in phonetics - the scientific study of the human voice. Researchers make precise recordings of voices, using both microphones and laryngographs. This latter device, developed by one of the academics who used this chamber, measures the opening and closing of the voice box while the subject speaks. Linguists at UCL use the recordings to identify the root causes of speech abnormalities in children.
Another device in the crowded control room is a spectrum analyser. "The spectrum analyser looks at the different frequencies in a voice," Cushing says. Using high-quality digital recordings, researchers employ the analyser to examine the minute details of speech, furthering our understanding of human expression. Other research in the department has investigated the hearing of people who have had ear surgery.
Elsewhere, scientists and engineers mainly use anechoic rooms for routine acoustic research, such as testing equipment and modelling sound propagation. But one complex technology developed in the chamber features finds a practical application in the nation's living rooms. "Head-related transfer functions" (HRTFs) underpin the surround sound effects in many computer games. Audio systems using this technology create their 3D sound effects using only a pair of normal stereo speakers. The illusion is created using a detailed acoustic model of the human head, developed in an anechoic chamber, to subtly tweak the sound so as to mimic the realism of five-speaker systems.
The silence of the anechoic room has inspired musicians, too. The American composer John Cage visited Harvard University's facility in the late 1940s. Though he was in a room with no background sound and no echo, Cage discovered that total silence is not actually possible: he claims he heard two sounds, "one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation". After this experience, he was inspired to write his "silent" piece, 4'33", in which the "music" is made by the ambient sounds of the concert hall alone.
Some people, standing in an anechoic chamber, have lost their balance. Professor Linda Luxon, an audiologist at the Institute of Child Health, questions why this might be. "I can't give you any rational explanation of why people would lose their balance in an anechoic chamber," she says. But she does agree that people find orientation easier if they have full use of all five senses.
As I step out of the anechoic chamber and back into the control room, my sensory deprivation ends. Before going into the chamber, I had thought the control room was quiet, but I now hear the fans of the computer systems, the echoes of students chatting outside. The shock of hearing all this is as great as was the shock of hearing nothing.