While I was looking for some Turkey Day inspiration I found the delightfully festive video below!
Born out of a town in England, the music genre of Dubstep slid on the music scene around 1999. With its heavy bass background and almost hypnotic beats dupstep has flooded the club scene!
With a frequency less than 90Hz and tunes that sound like Transformers getting it on Dubstep is perfect for a crazy night of dancing!
The emerging nature of this new genre makes the direct classification of Dubstep difficult especially with qualities that overlap with other genres such as electronica, dance and hip hop.
Whether you like jams of Skillrex and the rest or not I hope you enjoy festive video and have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
I know we have talked about a couple of different topics, but I'd like to tie some of what we have talked about in our articles with a post about infrasound itself. Infrasound is sound we can't hear, or sounds below human hearing. and it can be used naturally(earthquakes, etc.) or by human means. This post will talk a little more on how humans have used it currently and in the past.
We know sound can be deadly if used in the wrong hands. We talked about this a little more in depth here with LRAD. Infrasound itself can be related to many different things even ghosts as described here. To go more in depth of how it can be used for harm lets remember Iron Man the movie, when Obadiah uses a sound device to paralyze people? If you don't remember or want a refresher check out this video for a refresher.
Believe it or not this is a real application of sound devices that can be used. Infrasonic generators can cause negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, or depression, as well as biological symptoms like nausea, vomiting, organ damage, burns, or death—depending on the frequency and power level (Mark Rich). Similar devices have been used in the past and are being made by the U.S., Great Britain, Russian using low frequency sound waves in the development of acoustic weapons. These weapons are mostly being developed as a non-lethal approach to handling violence.
Above is what I imagine a sonic bullet would look like if we could see them, but under normal conditions we can't. Police, military and other forms of security can use sound bullets to incapacitate people without bloodshed and has been used in the case of riot control in more modern times by shooting the sound at the low infrasound frequencies. In fact in 1971 there was a good use of infrasound where they used it for riot control which can be further explained and detailed here. That article also goes further into explanation on some different sound weapons as does this one which I also referenced above. So while fun to learn about sound can be a deadly and scary thing or it can be nice and calming. Definitely better than real bullets though in the way of law enforcement.
Hope you enjoyed this little info session on the details of what we have been talking about.
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Going off of a great articlerecommendation left on our previous post “Shake your Tail Feather”, I decidedto look more into all of those sounds we can’t hear- and dang are there a lot! Inthe next couple of posts I would like to tell you about ultrasound andinfrasound.
While you may be familiar with theclassic ultrasound images of babies and even baby animals, advancements withultrasound technology have been able to produce 3-D ultrasound images!
Ultrasound is also being used to treat conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome and scar tissue pain. Current treatment prostate cancer is currently using ultrasound to destroy cancerous tissues! The process refered to as High Intensity Focused Ultrasound, or HIFU for short, involves ultrasound waves being focused on the damaged/cancerous tissues thus increasing the temperature at a very fast rate and destroying the cancer.
"In order to understand the basic concept of how HIFU works an analogy can be drawn between HIFU burning prostate tissue and sun rays entering a magnifying glass to burn a leaf. When a magnifying glass is held above a leaf in the correct position on a sunny day the sun's rays intersect below the lens and cause the leaf to burn at the point of intersection. "~International HIFU
As a part of our course work we were assigned to create a video to accompany our topic. The idea of this video was to entertain you and maybe teach you something that you didn't already know about sound. Please let us know what you think about Sound of Science's video debut!
Some key terms to make note of are frequency, amplitude, sound waves, timbre.
Sound Waves - They are basically sine waves caused by the vibration of an object that the enter the ear with varying frequency and amplitudes. It's what everyone listens to everyday. Frequency - How high the noise sounds, or pitch.This is effected by how close together the sound waves are. Higher frequency (faster) causes higher pitched sounds. Amplitude - How loud something sounds. This is caused by the height of the sine wave; higher amplitude waves are louder than lower amplitude. Timbre - The quality that differentiates one sound from another that has the same pitch (frequency) and loudness (amplitude).
One day, you and a friend are scuba diving off the shores of your favorite Pacific island. Its a normal sunny day, and you are watching a school of fish while your friend is off exploring a rock. Then all of a sudden the fish scatter and you hear a thunderous boom, scaring the crap out of you and the fish. Using those survival instincts you swim to the shore for safety and grab your buddy on the way. Your buddy is confused because did not hear anything, but you heard a bomb go off. So what happened?
Science! Underwater sound moves funny and far according to this math heavy article.
Really funny and
really far.
So what happened was, a bomb went off thousands of miles away and you hear it! Lucky you. The fun and magical properties of the deep sea allows sound to move or propagate in horizontal channels. These properties mainly deal with temperature and pressure at different depths. The result is low, or deep bass sounds, can move very far distances underwater. One time a 1.8 kg of TNT (very small) was detected over 19 thousand km away (very far). That less energy than a gallon of gas and almost half way around the earth!
So the next time you are under the sea and hear a large noise, don't panic, it can be miles and miles away.
