Thursday, February 11, 2016
That's just dumb.
For some reason I just now noticed this article in DiscoverMag, listing some trivia about the human voice. Most of it is dumb, one part is notably dumb:
On the other end of the musical spectrum, the lowest note ever sung was a G (-7) (0.189 hertz) by singer Tim Storms. Eight octaves below the lowest G on a piano, the note is actually outside of human hearing. It was captured using a low-frequency microphone and then verified via precision sound analysis.0.189 Hz is the dumb way of saying Five Seconds Per Cycle. First: anyone can flap their larynx at super-slow repetition rates. It takes a little concentration and awareness, but there's no real lower limit. If you could avoid doing anything else with the larynx like swallowing or coughing or talking, you could probably "sing" at a rate of one cycle per day or (the dumb way) 11.5 μHz. Second: You can't call this singing or even vocalization. The resonance of the mouth and nose has a lower bound which is probably around 20-30 cps. SURPRISINGLY, this is about the same as the lower end of our hearing. HMM. I WONDER HOW THAT HAPPENED? MUST BE A TOTALLY RANDOM COINCIDENCE. Flapping slower than 20 cps doesn't create a steady resonance above the larynx. Air is not bouncing back from the palate to the larynx. So this isn't vocalizing. It sounds like a series of pulses, similar to a series of unvoiced pulses with the tongue. (t--t--t--t--t) In other words, you're using the larynx as an articulator, not a vibrator. Each pulse creates a slight resonance, but these slight resonances don't 'stream' together to make a steady wave. Here's my illustration of single larynx flaps at a rate of about 2 per second. You can hear the momentary resonances from each, but there's no way you could call this singing or talking.
Labels: Metrology
¶ 5:07 AM
