fivefiftyfive

victoriousvocabulary:

PATHOPOEIA

[noun]

1. Rare: the arousing of emotion in someone who hears music; a passage designed to arouse emotions; an emotional response from music.

2. speech that moves hearers emotionally, especially as the speaker attempts to elicit an emotional response by way of demonstrating his/her own feelings; a speech, or figure of speech, designed to move the passion.

Etymology: from Ancient Greek παθοποιία (pathopoiia); πάθος (pathos, “passion”) + ποιέω (poieō, “make”).

[Alex Grey]

(Source: jdrox)

ianbrooks:

Shimmering DVD Display by Daniel Canogar

It was inevitable that the DVD would one day become archaic storage technology (think about telling your great-clonekids that instead of brain-to-brain lasers we used to have watch spinning discs that wouldn’t play properly if the wind changed direction), but even more inevitably that we’d find artistic uses for the approximately eleventy-eight trillion (according to a very scientific number I just made up) discs still lying about. Daniel created this contemplative shrine to rapidly aging information with the contents of each disc displayed back onto it, a meditative glimpse into the binary mind of entertainment. Check out the very cool video of the installation in action below:

Artist: Website (via: Faith is Torment)

jtotheizzoe:

Via the-science-llama:

Piano notes made visible for the first time

Music is beautiful isn’t it? The team at CymaScope visualized the dynamic sounds of the piano’s first strike and the eventual plateau and decay phase of different notes. You can listen to the sounds here and watch as the geometric shapes come to life.

Cymascope - Sound Made Visible

Did you see my post about piano notes as visualized via the Cymascope last week? Now with hypnotic animations!

I love when our senses combine to illuminate something that would otherwise be invisible, or worse, ignored. A reminder of the limitations of our senses, and an artistic nod to synesthesia.

Follow that with another example of sound made visible: Beautiful Chladni lines.

scinerds:

bpod-mrc:

Ear-y Noise

The cochlea, pictured super-magnified, is a spiralling tunnel that leads deep inside our ear. It acts as a funnel, feeding sound from the outside world through a ‘lawn’ of sensory hair cells which line the organ of corti, highlighted here in red. As noise floods in, the sensory hairs wave around, opening up electrical channels that take speedy messages to the brain. Our auditory hair cells are intricate and fragile, making them prone to damage by diseases and infections. The World Health Organization (WHO), promoting today as International Day for Ear and Hearing, supports immunization schemes worldwide in efforts to prevent hearing loss. They also advise on safety for people with noisy jobs – after all, constant exposure to loud noises can rip out our sensitive ear hair cells. Such damage is irreparable; we are born with just 30,000 of these precious hairs and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.

Written by John Ankers

—

• Bechara Kachar
• NIDCD, National Institutes of Health, USA

Ahh, Golden spiral, nice of you to drop by again.

neurosciencestuff:

Wired for Harmony?

Many creatures, such as human babies, chimpanzees, and chicks, react negatively to dissonance—harsh, unstable, grating sounds. Since the days of the ancient Greeks, scientists have wondered why the ear prefers harmony. Now, scientists suggest that the reason may go deeper than an aversion to the way clashing notes abrade auditory nerves; instead, it may lie in the very structure of the ear and brain, which are designed to respond to the elegantly spaced structure of a harmonious sound.

“Over the past century, researchers have tried to relate the perception of dissonance to the underlying acoustics of the signals,” says psychoacoustician Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal in Canada. In a musical chord, for example, several notes combine to produce a sound wave containing all of the individual frequencies of each tone. Specifically, the wave contains the base, or “fundamental,” frequency for each note plus multiples of that frequency known as harmonics. Upon reaching the ear, these frequencies are carried by the auditory nerve to the brain. If the chord is harmonic, or “consonant,” the notes are spaced neatly enough so that the individual fibers of the auditory nerve carry specific frequencies to the brain. By perceiving both the parts and the harmonious whole, the brain responds to what scientists call harmonicity.

In a dissonant chord, however, some of the notes and their harmonics are so close together that two notes will stimulate the same set of auditory nerve fibers. This clash gives the sound a rough quality known as beating, in which the almost-equal frequencies interfere to create a warbling sound. Most researchers thought that phenomenon accounted for the unpleasantness of a dissonance.

Read more

Seeing the sounds of the sea

The songs of whales and dolphins can be beautiful to the ear. Now acoustics engineer Mark Fischer has created a way to make them visually pleasing too. What’s more, his technique captures more information about the sound than traditional ways of visualising whalesong.