infrasound in music

[Per]

I recently got a question from my son, who studies acting, about the sound or noise, from hell.
I made a patch in the Nord G2, with 16 sine VCOs i pairs, pitched a few Hz from each other,with a slow random drift i pitch. All of the VCOs where below 30 Hz, so a typica pair could be 25 and 28 Hz, hard panned into two channels.
Playing it on a powerful PA was a heavy experience. I was a low pitched noise, but the infrasounds from the interference between the VCOs made it nearly impossible to stay in the room, it was physically and mentally hard to listen to.
Quite interesting, anyhow. It was the first time I managed to make noise I could not stand myself. And it turned the whole room into a resonance chamber.
Anyone around, working with infrasounds?
Per

[blue hell]

got to try this!

[Per]

Hello Jan, nice to hear from you.
Strange things happens in this area. I made most of the music with headphones, that not could carry the actual frequencies. But after an hour of patching, it was like the ears where heated, boiled in a way.
I can add a G2 patch to show it, but I have to pick it out of another computer first.
BTW, the effect on the audience was too heavy, my son used it for his first show, and then stopped.
In some police forces, infrasound (from a audio cannon, a short metal pipe with bursts from gas, and ignited by a fire plug) has been tried as a non lethal weapon against crowds. Heavy infrasound creates nausea, and make you loose balance and makes you nervous. I think most powerful is the 2-3 Hz sounds.
Per

[Sam_Zen]

Interesting area indeed.

I have my doubts about the headphones.
Maybe they don't produce any sound at these low frequencies, but it is fairly possible that the cone of the speaker is yet moving.
I've seen this with my studio speakers, using a few Hz from my analog synth.
Slowly moving to and fro, pumping air.

People can be quite sensitive to very low frequencies.
If lights are flashing at about 1.4 Hz (I may be wrong about the number, but in the very low area),
epileptic people can get into trouble.

And any LF interference, because sources are quite near in frequency, can be considered as a specific movement in time, so experienced.

[Acoustic Interloper]

I had a similar experience with a Max/MSP patch I was working on about 18 months ago, that used FFT/IFFT to do some pitch shifting of a live audio stream from my acoustic banjo. I was playing a depressing piece to begin with (entitled "Lost Soul'), and the combination of some low-frequency interference effects between dry and wet signals, and non-meter-multiple delays caused by the FFT and IFFT transforms that gave the music a sort of "slurred speech" effect, gave the piece a very depressing tonal quality.

I stopped working on it at the time. However, considering the fact that I wrote the acoustic piece on Halloween evening in 2003 (in a very good mood actually), and I am performing at EM2009 on Halloween afternoon, 2009, I have pretty much decided to revive work on it. I want to combine that effect with some vocals. It may leave the audience drained at the end of the set, but I figure, there's always another set coming to revive them

[nobody]

I have GOT to try this, or something like it.

[mysticalfairy]

Sounds you can feel, but not hear are just lovely

[nobody]

Sounds like a good tagline for an album or even a band:

SOUNDS YOU CAN FEEL.

[Uncle Krunkus]

I remember being at the RadioHead concert in Sydney 2004. They did a version of "I might be wrong". It has a fairly low guitar riff, a deep sine type kick drum, a deep sequence, and a bassline.
Standing down right in front of the stage, I could "feel" the interference between these tones going right through my guts. It was an amazingly powerful experience. Transcendental, religious even. But I'm sure it wasn't far away from me shitting my pants!!
Nicholas Tesla apparently built an enormous oscillating platform which he could wind right down to sub audible frequencies. He found that standing on it had all kinds of effects, from helping with digestion to the time Mark Twain stayed on it too long and lost all bowel control!!

[Per]

The infrasound did in fact had a short place in the sun in the 80ies, when movies about earthquakes and burning skyscrapers where popular.
If I remember it right, they had a special low noise generator, with two speakers, slightly out of tune. They where not fed from the soundtrack of the film, instead there was a sort of on and off signal in the film, that started the low noise generator. It made the chairs in the cinema vibrate, ans was installed in some public theatres. Was it maybe called Sensourround?
Anyway, the system got silent when the movie audience got tired of the bone-shaking noise.
Per

[Antimon]

A cool thing is to go to a rave or something where they have huge speakers on the ground, making sure you got your earplugs in, stand in front of the speakers and then see and feel your clothes flap and your body shake. Can't say I've done it more than once, but it was impressive nonetheless.

/Stefan

[robsol]

Since your bones vibrate at a different frequency than your muscles and internal organs there is the danger that you can suffer internal haemorrhage if you overdo it on a (very) large system.