Playing With Sounds in Your Head

Wired News ^ | 02:00 AM May. 01, 2004 PT | Katie Dean

[ckilmer]

The sound of fingernails scraping a dusty chalkboard makes a listener immediately squirm and cover her ears.

One company believes that there is real science behind such a reaction to sounds. NeuroPop is integrating neurosensory algorithms into music to create a certain mood and evoke more intense responses from listeners. The company hopes to market its compositions to the movie industry and video game companies.

[ckilmer]

seems to me you could ask any movie sound track guy who'se job it is to overlay music sound tracks on to movies...and he would tell you pretty precisely what sounds/music evoke what emotions.

[Rebelbase]

A dentist's drill sets me on edge.

[ckilmer]

true and loose lips sink ships.

[NewRomeTacitus]

Many sounds activate subconscious imagery and impulses. Every time obnoxious sound waves assault my auditory nerves from car stereos the culminating scene of "The Wild Bunch" flashes by. When it's layered with hyper-distorted bass beats the mental images take on hack & slash/wading through gore aspects. Haven't a clue as to why that occurs.

[E.Allen]

You can hear a dentist's drill in the background of "Pain" by Alice Cooper

[ckilmer]

I started singing in the choir at church because thirty years after I left my teen age years I could still hear the same old rock songs going through my head. Only with 30 years of perspective--most of them sounded either stupid or evil or both. It was driving me nuts.

man can't live by bread alone. etc.

the benefits of singing in the choir are two fold. first you get a great set of words and sounds going through your head. There is something else. Singing forces the sense of hearing to be the dominant sense --(as opposed to sight being the dominant sense.) As it happens the center of balance is in the inner ear. So when your hearing is your dominant sense your balance improves.

[NewRomeTacitus]

I was (lamely) joking about how rap and Mexican polkas and their ballads to drug-runners provoke my basic violent instinct to eliminate the sources of offensiveness.

Like your choir background I spent several years on classical music (piano), and find that is the antidote to the Hulk-like rage that the music of cultural divisiveness brings about. If it weren't for the rich legacy of those timeless masters I'd soon run out of purple pants.

"Hulk crush bad sound man! Aaargh!!!"

[Dark Glasses and Corncob Pipe]

"the benefits of singing in the choir are two fold."

Pavarotti once said in an interview that he never knew a choir member who suffered from depression.