Is it sounding like noise?

"The difference between sound and noise, is that noise is unwanted."

There is much in the media at the moment about wind farms. In particular about their viability as an alternative energy source. The government is concerned about the  “Noise” they make. There is an excellent paper outlining all that relates to wind farms, "noise" and their development for anyone who wishes to know more."The noise emissions associated with Wind Farming in Australia".

Windfarms create high levels of infrasound and low level frequency noise. 
They say you can have a normal conversation standing underneath a wind turbine. 
Those who oppose the wind turbines say that these infrasonic frequencies might release endorphins that won't let people relax: it might interfere with our brain waves. There is much that we don't know yet about sound and all of its properties. What we do know is that coal can be hazardous for many reasons. It was certainly a respiratory hazard, with other adverse health effects, acknowledged by  the Royal Commission into the Hazelwood Open Cut Mine Fire in 2014.  

Sound can be classified into different frequencies. The frequency is the speed at which it vibrates per second: Interestingly, Hertz is the German word for Heart. I remember at University delighting in the coincidence: the possibility that something at a higher frequencies might have a higher “Heart"
Just so you know...
Infrasonic: below 20z
Ultrasonic: above 20000 Hz
Supersonic: (faster than the speed of light). 

Where I am living in the urban bush (the middle of a State Park) presently, there are 3 sonic mice repellants plugged into wall sockets. Apparently, they are working well here, as before there were lots of mice in the house. I haven’t seen any, nor heard any (which is nice!). It seems like the dawn of a new implementation of technology, with sound being used to repel many animals. Using a phone app can exude the correct infrasonic frequency to repel mosquitoes. The mosquito frequency sits between 9.6 and 18.2 Hz depending upon the many factors that affect when mosquitoes come out to eat. Mice frequency sits higher at 32-62 Hz. And, just for some extra knowledge those dog and cat whistles are ultrasonic, being at 20000-25000Hz, out of our human hearing range. Check out our human Ranges of Hearing.

Just because we can’t hear something as humans, doesn’t mean it is not “hearable” (audible) It still means that it exists and we may just need the correct instruments to measure the sonic patterns. It can still affect us, possibly in both positive and negative ways. Here is a great story of a hearing impaired man who is recording the wifi landscape.  Wifi also has an infrasonic frequency and it is growing rapidly around us. Most homes these days in our modern, urban world are connected to Wifi and yet no one says their Wifi is noisy. (They may and do voice concerns about it in our environment).

We have found and are still finding all sorts of uses for these sound frequencies. 

As I sit here writing this, I have the crackle of the open fire, birds singing in the late pre-spring sun and the constancy of the Yarra River that never seems to stop making sound. I have been wondering whether the river is classified as white "noise", or pink "noise". As the river is near the rapids, apparently, it is more like red noise. It is loud and constant and took me a long while to get used to it.  I wrote a poem about the sleepless nights, called RiverBed.

All these colours remind me that there are rainbows of colour in light and that through the light we can see the colour. Messiaen was certainly a composer who used particular scales as they represented particular colours, and it is the Synesthete who often will say they see colours when they hear music. How exactly are light and sound related, and how do we explore this in more depth? I am indeed curious. 

The many different coloured noises are also amazing. Pink noise is white noise, with a predominance of lower frequencies so it sounds deeper.Pink noise affects tides and river heights, our heart beat, and the firings of single neurons. Pink noise can be found in pitch and loudness variations in speech and music.

White noise has been used as a remedy for tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and some people turn their radios to off the dial to get this white noise, and there are a multitude of you tube videos as well as sleep CD's to assist those who hear the constant zing. 

There is a voice and speech exercise that focuses on garnering the breath to sustain fricative sounds. The first is ssssss, which is “white noise” The second is shshshsh, which is pink noise.

Interestingly, a study in one of the big four banks here in Australia revealed that with piping pink noise through their speakers, there were less reported complaints. So perhaps pink noise is a key in achieving harmony…So much yet to discover about these frequencies. 

Back to wind farms....Engineers are looking to Owls for creating  the best blade design for wind farms, as Owls are renowned for hunting and flying soundlessly and they are keen to make blades that emit the smallest amount of "noise". We are on the cusp of this new advancing technology. 

What are your thoughts?

Sound and Silence: a(n) (H)earpoint

“The important notes were the ones I didn’t play.” Louis Armstrong

Contemplation and meditation, as well as musings gathered from regular ocean walks, helped me to become aware again as to why sound was so important to me. People around me seemed to be able to be with a lot of loud noise, a lot of the time. Not so for me. I am starting to make silence a regular part of my day. Without it my nervous system becomes over-stimulated and the parasympathetic nervous system becomes elusive having all sorts of body ramifications.

From birth I was significantly vision impaired. I needed to hear and touch the world. I could not see things and did not see things as others saw them. I was exposed to an alternative sensorial environment: one where sound was paramount. Individuating people and their moods from their unique sound “aroma”. I have vague early recollections that this led to a great deal of fatigue; where silence was a balm when I did not have to be on alert. When i did get glasses it was a whole new way of information entering my psyche, which I adored. I would read to excess, under the covers, even though my eyes hurt.  

Even at this age, I had such a strong desire to know more; to understand the world. It wasn't until I was in my mid 30's that I had a true experience of depth perception: seeing the world in 3D. Oliver Sack's book "The Minds Eye" tells the story of a woman who has 2D vision (unable to sense depth). I  related to that instantly upon reading it, where much of my visual world then made sense. From this visual lack, my auditory and kinaesthetic worlds are my strength. I am lucky for as a voice specialist, visual detail is not the most important aspect. I can hear the voice in a uniquely different way from so many early experiences where this was vital to my survival. It now acts as one of my primary tools of differentiation.

I looked to my creative world for silence to fully immerse myself in the experience of sound at its most delicate. We are exposed to copious amounts of “ambient” noise each day. On any given day in a local café, I could hear the sounds of gulls, traffic, cups, coffee machines, people chattering, exhausts, skateboarders and many other noise cues, as well as music. Interestingly, it was also here in noisy places that I had the opportunity to become aware of my body, my thoughts, and emotions. It seems that when there is too much sound (known as auditory bombardment), I have the opportunity to not listen to any of it (for short periods only).

I was able to contemplate auditory selection versus bombardment in reading the journal of  Acoustical Society of America (ASA) (2012) “Although we have little awareness that we are doing it, we spend most of our lives filtering out many of the sounds that permeate our lives and acutely focusing on others -- a phenomenon known as auditory selective attention.” 

It is interesting that those who get hearing aids for the first time often give up for this exact reason. It takes up to 6 months for the neural re-structuring to filter out unwanted sounds. For many, they wear them non-stop for 3 days, become auditorally 'burnt out', place them in a drawer and never use them again. There needs to be a making peace with the sound world again.

The balance between sound and silence is a unique aspect of my musicality and performance. 

I began to look into my creative sound world through a lens of selective attention to express increasingly subtle nuances of sound. I started to question if could invite people into my auditory unique world: To show them a prism of my conscious world; an invitation to sense another viewpoint. Or a(n) “(h)earpoint.”

This led me to further performance musings.What state does one have to be in in order to truly hear and to be here? Does selectively hearing make us more present to our environment? The idea arose that there might be multiple stages of presence. What would guide people to be more present to themselves and the sounds around them? 

How could I invite others to be present to sound in performance? Is it through shock- as I have seen so many others do, such as in horror movies or certain theatre performances. Or is it through subtle sublime-ness, which I have also seen, such as a performance by Chamber Made Opera and Rawcus theatre company in their show “Another Lament”. Here there were definite feelings in the silence. Some silences were peaceful and others were strident. 

In performance I have a sense that I want to wait until the echoes have ended. Call and silent response, silent response and then call and so the cycle continues. 

Finding ways to strike the balance between sound and silence, for therein lies the power and the harmony between us and the world around us.