#43

On the toxic website someone suggested

It sort of depends how you describe the sound. “A sound higher than the human hearing range” is possible. “The sound of a wombat wrestling a blue whale” is possible, but very impractical.

An enduring image :thinking::thought_balloon:

This is in the “one-hand clapping” territory I think, and suggests (though doesn’t explicate) the pattern “you cannot make the sound of φ”, where φ is some impossible event or occurrence.

An example connecting to a metaphor about impossibility would be “the sound of cows flying”.

#44

Are they still considered sounds?

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#45

Nope!

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#46

I suppose a pure sinusoid would be impossible because of analogue and acoustic (and physical?) distortions

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#47

And similarly a pure pulse wave since objects can only move so fast!

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#48

sounds of time crystals

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#49

Made me think about the physics of it. Sound for us is alternations of densely packed medium (air, for example) and rarefied medium beating on our eardrum. The wave itself is more like when you stretch out and then push quickly on a slinky (compression wave) than a wavy sine wave thingie.

So, maybe a sound that rarefies the air molecules into a vacuum in the “trough” phase. Or a sound that compacts air into a solid which then smacks up against our bodies but can’t get into our ear canals.

Also all the phase shifted things which cancel each other out.

Fun topic and thoughts in here!

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#50

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?”

Just hows’about’in the subject - interesting topic!

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#51

This is a statement about aesthetics and in this sense there’s nothing to argue about. But also, it is factually incorrect. Plenty of synthesis can compete with decent recordings, even great recordings. And win.

Let me give you just three examples.

  1. Pianoteq piano synthesis is fooling trained pianists in double-blind tests to the point where Steingraeber is employing it in their silent pianos. It also allows for effortless configuration of alternate tunings and physical setups (like a super-long soundboard).

  2. Melodyne and Auto-Tune (when used strictly as corrective devices) are so transparent that listeners cannot tell if those tools were even used. Sometimes not even the singers know that some minor adjustment was made while mixing.

  3. Time stretching is a form of synthesis: you put data in that wasn’t there. Today’s algorithms allow for tempo adjustments that are indistinguishable from the real deal.

Ergo, synthesis can indeed compete. However, all three examples I’m bringing up have one thing in common: there’s a component of modelling, in other words recreation of complexity that occurs naturally. This is a complex task and simple synthesizers cannot compete here. We’ve only started making progress here when general purpose computing took over. So yes, OP, SuperCollider will be definitely more capable than OP-Z in the range of sounds it can create.

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#52

Haven’t read through all of these, but a few years ago a transformer exploded about five blocks away from our home. It covered the entire block in the CLEAREST sound I have ever heard. It was a boom, but so clean and without artifact that it just glowed through the home as it kept on dissipating. No oscillating bass rumble, or fizzling crack, but a BOOM in the clearest sense of the word. A glossy boom. Never heard a sound that clear — white light, really. It sounded like exploding light.

Everyone in the living room thought the boom was in front of us, but our cat looked back in the other direction. She was correct. It was five blocks behind us. Never had such a respect for animal hearing.

I think that’s the only sound I’ve ever heard that can’t be synthesized, or even recorded. You need to actually explode a transformer to hear it.

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#53

Sounds perceived in impossible ways is another thought. Reminds me - I used to ‘experience’ exploding head syndrome - sounded like someone hitting a 2x2m sheet of suspended metal right inside my head - I’d then wake up and walk round the house looking for what it was (before I knew), but it was always the acoustic purity of the resonance that made me think something fishy was afoot…

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#54

Using 12bit, 22khz resolution (assuming that’s enough to get the jist of a sound and not worrying too much about frequencies that I can’t hear), then there are this many 1 second sounds. None of them are impossible, but most of them will sound like noise :slightly_smiling_face:

And that’s before we put the 1 second sounds together to get longer sounds.

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#55

Yeah this is the enumeration argument, and in “enumeration” we of course observe the word “number” buried in there. If any number can be constructed, and sounds are numbers, there are no impossible sounds.

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#56

Well you also hit the digital Vs analogue argument. To enumerate sounds you are required to number a given sound pressure at a given moment. In order to do this you need a finite set of sound pressure measured at a finite subdivision of time. You, hence, need a corollary to that argument around the minimum variation that is discernible by any given listener. I believe most people consider 48khz 16bit to be acceptable for playback (recording had different requirements like headroom).

For context, I remember calculating the dynamic range of a 32 but floatng point audio recording; it could encode (in a single file) sounds with a dynamic range representing the ratio of the quietest place in earth, up to the sound pressure 100ft from an atomic bomb (I can’t remember which and it may not have been exactly 100ft), while maintaining decibel granularity of a typical 24 bit recording.

As for temporal granularity, some under sea mammals have perception up to 150khz, so we’d want to place the nyquist limit above that, let’s say 320khz. In other words, on earth a 32 bit 320khz recording should suffice to record anything from the perception of any complex lifeform. Via a strange information argument you could say that’s 2^32 values / (1000000000000ps/320khz) = 1374 possibile sounds per picosecond.

Anyway, this post was mostly me thinking about the question of how best to enumerate rather than a specific response: thanks for kicking off that train of thought.

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#57

Isn’t a true square wave impossible? Due to the infinitely fast movement from peak to peak?

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#58

I’m really glad you were able to narrow it down to a comprehensible number. That’s like a definition of an elementary particle in physics. Thanks!

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#59

I’ve heard electrostatic speakers get closer to a pure square wave compared to dynamic speakers.

Perhaps listening to a square wave through a plasma tweeter at the top of a mountain at low air pressure would get the more physically possible accurate square wave!

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#60

On the subject (hopefully not getting too off-topic for this thread) of exploratory synthesis, the new issue of computer music journal is all about NESS, a new approach to physical modelling synthesis:

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#61

Definitely a great mental puzzle!
Can we call them “irrational sounds”?

Reminds me of something I read once about “fruit that doesn’t exist, and wouldn’t even be in season if it did.”

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#64

I think of sound as what we hear, not what we perceive, moreover as the pressure waves in the air picked up by our ears. If you extend your definition of sound to include the entire experience of being in the presence of a given phenomenon and its effect on your entire body it becomes extremely difficult to even converse about sound in any specific, quantitative fashion.

Regarding pressure in particular, there is an effect on every part of your body, to some degree, from any force but this doesn’t mean each one contributes to the same degree; in particular your ears are the dominant means by which sound is experienced, in the same way as other organs and cells have response to incident EMF the majority of sensing in that domain comes from the eyes (again, ignoring perception which js personal and internal).

Beyond this, I believe it is the role of an artist (in any medium) in trying to recreate a feeling or sense (internal or external) to work within their medium to convey something that goes beyond merely documenting. It is their role to create a work that can evoke something beyond what the notes, images or anything else convey. Specifically they can try and convey their perception, imagination and experience to others; the artful use of the tools at their disposal can allow them to create a work that feels more real than simple documentation.

My thoughts on the brain with respect to memory, percetion etc are also quite different. Specifically the current crop of machine learning technology utilises deterministic and simplistic (compared to a human brain) models and is capable of identification and creation (that’s to say extrapolation with respect to data models). I find it quite easy to imagine (with the exponential increase in connectivity afforded by enlarging systems) that the human condition could be modelled in such a way, without resorting to quantum effects or other higher order complexities. By virtue of their deliberate design and structure, I suspect they can also be more efficient meaning you probably won’t even need to reach human scale in neural complexity to achieve such results.

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