Are some sounds impossible?

praffensperger · 2021-10-09T11:29:45.311Z

Gexex:

I once attempted to reproduce the sound of my voice in my head using filters and eq, but was entirely unsuccessful. The composition of my inner head is perhaps too specific and flawed to be reproduced outside of that space. I wonder if the specificity (a sound only I may hear) makes it “impossible?”

This is an interesting one. Perhaps a case of a sound that you can’t reproduce with external speakers or even headphones. I remember a talk titled “Recording and implementing dialogue for VR applications” at a 2018 AES conference (see https://azrael.digipen.edu/AVAR2018/WednesdaySchedule.pdf) where they worked on a video game where they wanted to mix in the voice of the character that you play as. They said something about recording an impulse response of a model skull and using that as a filter. Wild stuff.

sixolet · 2021-10-09T15:08:25.578Z

Having just read this thread for the first time it strikes me that if you’re talking about a physical pattern of vibrating air at your eardrum, yeah probably all sounds are possible.

But if you’re talking about the subjective impression that you perceive as sound, there may be some that aren’t created by vibrating air at all, and as such need something else to create that “impossible” sensory experience. Like drugs, or direct neuron stimulation, or psychosis, or sufficient imagination. Maybe that’s a little of what @chalkwalk was getting at upthread.

mrsoundboyking · 2021-10-09T15:21:15.797Z

The only impossible sound is the one occurring after death.

morgulbee · 2021-10-09T18:35:39.777Z

Impossible sound: the sound of one hand clapping.
(sorry, that’s an old joke)

One sound that is (apparently) impossible to record is the sound of tinnitus. If it could be recorded, then perhaps a device could be created that cancels it to relieve the suffering. This is related to the comment about reproducing the sound of the voice in your head, or any other sensation your brain perceives as sound but is not caused by air vibrations.

zbs · 2021-10-09T23:06:09.230Z

I wonder if it would even cancel it out, since it’s so inside your head / psychological? I don’t know enough to have an answer, just wondering out loud.

sixolet · 2021-10-09T23:57:38.064Z

I actually just read about sound perception in a book enough to know! It turns out that by the time it gets to neurons being activated, humans are insensitive to phase, so you wouldn’t be able to de-activate those neurons by finding a canceling phase of sound.

aeoner · 2021-10-10T01:54:46.176Z

When I was younger I had this weird thing called exploding head syndrome, which triggered just before I fell in sleep when I was very tired: it was a massive noise, with a “crunchy” sound and a flash of white light. I never managed to create this specific, sinesthesic, raw noise - but I keep trying

Blit · 2021-10-10T02:23:07.912Z

I didn’t know those had a name. I used to get them after drinking/smoking or after a loud party. I thought of then as sound hallucinations

_mark · 2021-10-10T06:44:24.523Z

Me too!

Exactly the same, and I didn’t discover what it was until I was 30 or so…

I’d be looking round the house for the thing that had fallen over!

louwrens · 2021-10-10T08:14:03.553Z

Really interesting, I’ve never heard / heard of this sound before but it reminds me of a sound that I’ve always wanted to recreate. During an episode of sleep paralysis I’d often hear something that seems like a whooshing, droning or pulsating sound that would get more and more intense and enveloping. Since it usually occurs during the hypnogogic state it is hard to recall exactly what it sounded like or whether it could actually be described as a sound at all. Either way I will one day attempt to ‘capture’ it.

xmacex · 2021-10-10T11:10:04.265Z

Thanks for animating this thread people. Lines is a good place

I am on a walk and listening to a podcast about Jo Milne who heard anything at all for the first time when her cochlear implant was activated at the age of forty. I’ve seen that famous, and extremely powerful mobile video of her earlier¹, but it’s nice/a privilege to get closer to her experience and life with sound. I think it might be impossible for the rest of us to hear sound like Jo does.

Sound Matters: 05 – New Ears And Strange Rooms Stream episode 05 – New Ears And Strange Rooms by Sound Matters podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

Googling her name brings a number of stories on the internet from which, i believe, we can all learn from.

¹ i cry every time i see it

hermbot · 2021-10-10T13:40:50.308Z

Fascinating! Terrifying, too.

Apparently I can do this which is somewhat rare, never thought to recreate digitally it and only recently learned what it was.

Being able to make yawn rumbles at will is as exotic of a super power as I’ll get, unfortunately.

aeoner · 2021-10-10T14:50:06.199Z

I don’t remember anymore if I read about the expoding head syndrome when I was still having some episodes or just after, but I was when I found it (bad joke, sorry - it was quite disturbing).

Interesting what you are saying about looking for the falling object: when the episodes started I thought it was an electric discharge from my CRT television, because there was a kind “static” feeling in the super loud sound and the white bright light etc.

@louwrens recently I had a very interesting and beautiful episode of sleep paralysis.

Although It’s very rare for me to experience those phenomenons (in spite of thos situations, my sleep is deep), when they happened was very visual and absolutely frightening, watching objects of my room merge into monster faces etc.

In this recent one I left by accident a small part of the window open.

There’s a lot of birds around here, so very early in the morning I had this gentle feeling (?) with a beam of light shinning over me and the birds singing in a high pitched tone until they are singing my name. I couldnt move at all but this one was very beautiful and sublime, not disturbing at all.

This topic just give me the idea of this kind of choir-like, polyphonic speech synthesis turning intl something else (or the opposite).

timp · 2021-10-10T20:32:00.142Z

(off topic but ‘exploding head syndrome’ is the subject of a new film “Memoria” by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, starring Tilda Swinton… I had a few email exchanges with the sound designer, can’t wait to see/hear it!)

_mark · 2021-10-11T09:37:59.041Z

For anyone curious, this is the passage I mentioned earlier, from: Echoes of other worlds by Tom Garner:

Somatosensory forms of tinnitus, in which the perceptual experience can be traced to an internal physiological source, have been documented but in most cases, the sensation is entirely psychological, with no physical correlate identified. Similarly, ‘exploding head syndrome’ describes a rarer condition in which individuals feel an intense and sudden explosive sound with no apparent sound wave. The experience is an example of parasomnia, due to it most commonly taking place during the transitional phase between sleep and wakefulness. If you have ever been awoken by the sound of a door slamming or similar explosive event but no one else nearby has reacted even slightly and there’s no trace of any possible cause, you may have experienced exploding head syndrome. Case studies conducted by Ganguly and colleagues (2013) evidence the above description and note that, to the individuals affected by the condition, the sound as it is experienced cannot be distinguished from that which has a physical correlate.

Blit · 2021-10-11T13:32:37.373Z

@_mark I don’t want to derail from the original topic nor be mean about your ppst but does that quote of tinnitus has a bibliography or source? I would take it with a grain of salt as most tinnitus has a physical cause (tmj, accoustic trauma, inflammation of the tympanic membrane, tumors, middle ear inflammation born of infection of the eutachian tube)

_mark · 2021-10-11T18:31:01.629Z

Not even sure why I pasted that bit as not relevant to my point!

But it may be from here:

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laneur/PIIS1474442213701601.pdf

But I can’t check it as behind a pay wall.

zebra · 2021-10-11T21:00:52.971Z

this seems either awkwardly phrased or just interpreting the sources in a weird way. “in most cases, the sensation is entirely psychological, with no physical correlate identified.” as stated, that’s just not true. most cases of tinnitus are correlated with cochlear lesions (regions of damaged tissue.) such lesions can have a variety of causes, from noise exposure to ototoxic drugs (often chemotherapy.) the classic diagnosis kind of assumes this.

(the VR book author is mixing up physical diagnostic correlates with, like, physical acoustic phenomena? idk?)

the work of Langguth (and others cited by this VR sound book) is interesting because it is looking at neuronal correlates of tinnitus, both for diagnosis and for therapy. this just means that there is some identifiable pattern of neural activity associated with the sensation, and that not only can these patterns iddentify the patient as experiencing tinnitus (perhaps across language barriers etc.), but that one can actually alleviate the experience by treatment of the neuronal correlates (behavior therapy, sound therapy etc.) but this is sort of a last resort given a lack of identified, treatable pathologies.

this diagnostic flowchart from the linked paper is perhaps clarifying

image830×863 87.4 KB

sorry i don’t mean to further the tangent, but i think it’s important to get the facts straight around auditory health questions. the TL/DR is that if you have serious tinnitus, please consult a doctor instead of assuming it is a mysterious psychological phenomenon best addressed by sound or behavior therapy.

_mark · 2021-10-11T21:17:11.037Z

zebra:

but i think it’s important to get the facts straight around auditory health questions

Yes for sure.

I also don’t know the reason for it if in error, perhaps misunderstanding the source I suppose. I’m certainly not qualified to gauge here.

ChemicalAdam · 2021-10-11T22:04:25.675Z

Back in University I confused my Professor & classmates with my statement that, acoustically, square waves cannot exist in nature since the instantaneous binary oscillation could not actually take place in any physical medium - at least not without some kind of “quantum rarefaction” (I struggled to keep a straight face whilst using my newly invented terminology) during which the air molecules would spontaneously jump from one pressure to another and thus create no soundwave to speak of.

However, the square wave could be a sonic cousin of reddish green and other so-called impossible colours which cannot appear in nature because of the nature of light waves, yet can be perceived within the mind through hallucinations & mystical experiences. By hacking the electrical representation of the square wave directly into the brain one could bypass the pesky physical limitations of reality, air & the human ear, and perhaps “hear” (or audiate?) the tangiest, most overtone-rich spicy boy of a pulse wave that ever there was…

tl;dr probably all sounds are possible somehow. You ever hung out with a big group of ADHD addled beatboxers with access to drugs & DSP? I have heard some fkkn bizarre noises in my time haha

/peace