Sound Research for Personal Project.

After my tutorial with Kathleen last week, where she gave me some suggestions for research, I went away and did some broad research around the topic I wish to base my project on.

I firstly researched Maryanne Amacher who was an American composer and sound designer who sadly died a few years ago. Her work was very site specific and she liked to incorporate the acoustics of a particular place in her work. She also used psychoacoustics to create auditory illusions in her work, namely, otoacoustic emissions which is mostly used for testing hearing. It is a sound which is given off by the inner ear when the ears are stimulated by sound. When you hear these sounds they feel as if they are coming from inside your head.

"When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones 'dance' in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes ... Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! ... these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception ... I want to release this music which is produced by the listener ..." (Maryanne Amacher)

Here is an example of a piece of work that includes this called Synaptic Island:

This led me to research other psychoacoustic illusions in connection to this one. One of which I found to have a similar kind of effect to the one above, which is called a Phantom Voice. This occurs when two tones are played or sung together and a third tone is produced, seemingly from a different source. It feels as if it is coming from the centre if you play both tones in separate ears. Here is an example of it:

If you listen closely you can hear a third higher tone here which does not exist in reality.

Your brain also perceives beats in sound if two tones are played at slightly different frequencies, with a difference of less than 30hz. This is because of the way your brain deals with the frequency difference of each tone which then allows you to hear a beat that isn't there. Here is an example of this:

The last illusion I looked at in depth is something called a scale illusion. It was discovered by a psychologist in 1973 called Diana Deutsch. The illusion starts with a scale, with low and high notes played into both ears respectively. The illusion makes it appear as if the high notes are played in one ear and the low notes are played in the other. In reality the scale is played with some highs in one ear and some in the left, and vice versa for the right. However the way our brain processes the sound makes it appear the way it does. Here is an example of it:

http://philomel.com/mp3/musical_illusions/Scale_illusion.mp3

Lastly I researched another artist called Karlheinz Stockhausen. He works in music, but unconventionally. A lot of his pieces focus on one or two aspects of sound, enhancing them and exploring them. I looked at a variety of his pieces but I found an article which spoke a bit about a particular one called Kontakte.

Karlheinz Stockhausen created a pivotal moment in the history of music with his work Kontakte (1958-1960). According to the composer, “In the preparatory work for my composition Kontakte, I found, for the first time, ways to bring all properties of sound [i.e. timbre, pitch, intensity and duration] under a single control.” The most famous moment, at 17:03 minutes, is a potent illustration of these connections. A high, bright tone descends in several waves, becoming louder as it gradually acquires a snarling timbre, and finally passes below the point where it can be heard any longer as a pitch. As it crosses this threshold, it becomes evident that the tone consists of pulses, which continue to slow until they become a steady beat.

This famous descending tone uncovers a fundamental understanding of our hearing. Once a tone passes below the threshold of 16 Hz we stop perceiving tone, and start to hear beats. The range of hearing was never explored in this way before this moment, because there was no instrument that could perform this frequency range. Up until that time, beats and tones were considered separate musical properties – and often they still are. Beats belong to the realm of rhythm and tempo, and tones to melody and harmony. With Kontakte, Stockhausen showed that beats and tones form a continuum, and the distinction between them is an illusion. It is exclusively due to the lower threshold in our hearing, whether we perceive sound as beats or tone.

Stockhausen worked with instruments and with electronic ways of creating sound, and it is understood that he paved the way for electronic music to come about. Here is Kontatke:

All of this research has given me some context into sound, and how it manipulates the body. Now I can think about how to draw up a plan for what I want to achieve with my own sound design.