I've been chasing infrasonic ranges in home audio for over 2 decades. You can't "detect" these frequencies in the normal way. You experience them by way of your physical environment being excited by them. <i>Feeling</i> pressure waves move through whatever you are standing/sitting on can add an entire new dimension to the experience.<p>I used to run experiments with friends and family using a 800L ported subwoofer tuned to ~13Hz with a 40Hz cutoff. Not one person would mistake it for being on vs off. Certain content makes these frequencies substantially more obvious. Classical music performed in large concert halls is one surprising candidate outside of Mission Impossible scenes. Being able to "feel" the original auditorium in your listening room is a very cool effect to me.
They really should have said "inaudible" rather than undetectable. It is detectable (as they note)... just not as what we think of as sound. [edit - fix; how did I leave out words?]<p>I don't know how common this is now, but at one time it was popular in the car audio world to mount "ass shaker" devices to seats to emphasize bass feeling without requiring the space of a normal speaker. I think cinemas have done this too.
I can confirm this. It’s also nice to see a new paper on this. I’ve been using this knowledge professionally for the last 24 years as a front of house engineer.<p>Anecdotal story time:
You’ve may have seen this video, or some variation of or maybe even the TED talk inspired by it…<p><a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk</a><p>…what few people know and most don’t because I have not shared this publicly (in media at least) is that I was mixing this show.
We we’re on in the middle of the day and a few bands had been on before us. By this point in my career I had already been to the gorge several times and the hill has always been a problem. On this particular day during the already frantic pace of a festival changeover with no sound check, the system tech is talking up the new delay stacks they beefed up for this year. This was great news and were geeking out and he’s showing me where they’re at on the console which is of course buried under some convoluted series of navigation and button presses to get to, given the atrocious UI design of digital electronics. Now generally given these circumstances, convention holds that the delays are set to some arbitrary value and the guest engineer generally need not concern themselves as the system techs will be monitoring them. To my horror were getting to the dancy part of our short set and I’m doing my due diligence and looking back at the hill and wondering whats up, why isn’t anyone dancing!?! The delays were not turned up! None of the previous engineers that day had thought about them and the techs while excited had set them to some arbitrarily safe low level. So for me this video marks the moment I checked the delays that day and turned up the bass. So if I may add to the TED talk; if you want to start a movement, turn up the bass.<p>This effect is literally everyday at work for me and why I have a job.
This effect is also used in dramatic movies, for example sci-fi and horror. It was used in the recent sound-award-winning Dune movie, where they used some interesting techniques for recording low-frequency sound, like recording moving sand dunes:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KHcbp8szrY&t=257s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KHcbp8szrY&t=257s</a><p>There's also an app for detecting low-frequency sounds, although it seems surprising that cell phone microphones have the necessary frequency sensitivity. They seem to use some interpretation processing though the code is proprietary:<p><a href="http://www.toon-llc.com/support/lfd_en.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.toon-llc.com/support/lfd_en.html</a>
Not to rain on the parade, but in Fig. 1-D I see by comparing the two graphs that the VLF is almost always turned on in sync with a bass drop or with the start of a new section of the song, which I think is correlated with people suddenly dancing more vigorously. I didn't read the main text, does anyone know if they address this?
As someone with with sensitivity to low frequencies: yay, yet another excuse people will use to turn every single public space into an inaccessible bassy sensory hellscape.
Some people may find this offensive, but try to imagine the person who made the study was deaf in the low range of frequencies and did the study without getting it reviewed by anybody. Now read it again...
Well, it always nice to have confirmation of well known phenomena.<p>Now, can people stop designing sound systems with cutoff frequencies on the tens of hertz?
> <i>a performance by the electronic music duo Orphx</i><p>Maybe EDM fans are conditioned to react to bass sounds, the lower the frequency the better? Would be interesting to try if the same effect can be achieved with other music genres too...
The visceral feeling of walking into the heavy bass at Cream, a 90s nightclub in Liverpool, for the first time is something I'll never forget, and yeah much dancing ensued :)
As has been pointed out, if the authors knew what they were talking about they would have said "inaudible"; nevertheless, the article is still bogus at best. Fans of Orphx wear motion capture and the it appears the tracks with lower frequecies (lower like a regular rhythmic kick drum or bassline, perhaps?) caused fans more pleasure & dancing when questioned post concert. I found the whole article utter twaddle. Two places that I have experienced being bombarded with very loud and continuous VLFs (their terminology), and not regular rhytmic VLFs, is at a Sunn O))) gig and another at an experiemnt along the lines of a infamous Guantanamo correctional facility. I can tell you no one was dancing at either.
My favorite track to test speakers for sub-bass / low frequencies:<p>Gwety Mernans by Aphex Twin from the album Drukqs, 2001<p>You could literally hold a conversation in the room while your walls and windows are shaking! Cheers :)
At these lower frequencies, sounds don't transfer well from solids to air and vice versa.<p>That means the ground shaking at 10 Hz (like an earthquake), and the air shaking at 10 Hz, might feel very different.
The French movie “Irreversible” famously used these kinds of sounds to make it even more difficult to watch in theaters, I remember feeling a sense of danger and tension.
I have a hypothesis that these frequencies stimulate bacteria that live in/on you and cause them to modulate some neurotransmitters.<p>Basically, they like it.
D&B make those awesome J-Infra[0] subs for a reason. With the low end extending all the way down to 27hz they really make a difference on a large pa system<p>[0] <a href="https://www.dbaudio.com/global/en/products/heritage/j-infra/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dbaudio.com/global/en/products/heritage/j-infra/</a>
Modern subwoofers can get up to 15HZ (<i>), so if you want to pump up your party, just make sure you make it in a very big room in order for the waves to travel nicely.<p>(</i>) <a href="https://www.thomann.de/intl/subwoofer.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.thomann.de/intl/subwoofer.html</a>
oh... so when you <i>feel the beat</i>, people like to dance?<p>I've always wanted speakers with about a 3Hz cutoff, for this very reason. I'd be willing to do that experiment... I'd bet kids raised with headphones instead of huge speakers can't tell the difference, but I'm pretty certain I can.<p>When you see the 15" woofer cone excursions, you rapidly learn what infrasound feels like.<p>I bet the skill of detecting it can be learned in minutes.<p>PS: Reminds me of the time in 1982 when we borrowed a function generator and found the resonance frequency of our floor in Sharpenberg Hall at Rose-Hulman. On of the guys had a DC coupled stereo and speakers, and I warned them to watch out for DC offset not to fry the voice coils.
I shared this with my brother, a musicology professor, and he quickly pointed me to this: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note</a>
Anyone else here on HN experienced the Valve Sound System?<p>You don't hear the bass - you FEEL it.<p>I've been to maybe a hundred raves over 20 years on the dancefloor and nothing has come close except maybe DVS's Wall of Sound.<p>RIP The End :-(
oh finally the hi-fi market can step up and provide 0 up to 100.000 hz speakers and of course, composers composing feelings of hypothetical effects or melodies under 20 hz!!!!