Sometimes, when I create something
in the middle of the night, I go to bed around 3 - 4 o'clock
in the morning, then I often perceive a continuous "mechanical
like" under-sound. Is this soft hardly audible hum coming
from a deep-freeze installed in the cellar of fruitcompany, 500
m from my house? No. Is it maybe the secret undefinable hum of
70 Hz that sciensists locate in the underground and study now
with seismographical tools?
Normally, we cannot distinguish
sounds below 20 Hz. The spectrum of a CD starts from 20 Hz up
to 20000 Hz. Under good circumstances, we can only register the
vibration but not hear sounds below 20 Hz. Think about the overpowered
subwoofers in cars on steroides that just trill and don't bring
about 'funky music' (white boy).
Click and look in
the ELEPHANT site of Susan Baetz © Photo
With the lowest bass tones between
14 and 35 Hz, the elephant communicates with other elephants
over a distance of 8 km (because these frequencies don't suffer
from glitches, compared to the unpowered high frequencies). Due
to his monumental resonating corpus, the elephant can produce
bass sounds with the pressure of 103 decibel.
 |
An organ pipe that evokes
16 Hz is 11 meter high, and weighs 306 kg. You can visit this
instrument in the Dom of Passau (GER). With 17774 pipes, the
dom organ of Passau is the biggest organ of the world. The smallest
organ pipe (i.e. the highest note) isn't longer than 6 mm, just
the top of your little finger. The canary is able to produce
a tone of 16000 Hz (which is about the real upper limit of the
sane human ear).
Click
here and go to the DOM site
|
Thanks to Andreas Günther (in: Stereoplay
5/2003) for the introduction to the earth-hum and the power of
elephant sound.
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