The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music

in Music, Neuroscience, Science | October 23rd, 2015

Photo by Sebastiaan term Burg via Wikimedia Commons

At the lower range of hearing, it’s said humans can hear sound down to about 20 Hz, beneath which we encounter a murky sonic realm called “infrasound,” the world of elephant and mole hearing. But while we may not hear those lowest frequencies, we feel them in our bodies, as we do many sounds in the lower frequency ranges—those that tend to disappear when pumped through tinny earbuds or shopping mall speakers. Since bass sounds don’t reach our ears with the same excited energy as the high frequency sounds of, say, trumpets or wailing guitars, we’ve tended to dismiss the instruments—and players—who hold down the low end (know any famous tuba players?).

In most popular music, bass players don’t get nearly enough credit—even when the bass provides a song’s essential hook. As Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joked at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1995, “thank you to my friends for remembering my phone number.” And yet, writes Tom Barnes at Mic, “there’s scientific proof that bassists are actually one of the most vital members of any band…. It’s time we started treating bassists with the respect they deserve.” Research into the critical importance of low frequency sound explains why bass instruments mostly play rhythm parts and leave the fancy melodic noodling to instruments in the upper range. The phenomenon is not specific to rock, funk, jazz, dance, or hip hop. “Music in diverse cultures is composed this way,” says psychologist Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University Institute for Music and the Mind, “from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin.”

Trainor and her colleagues have recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggesting that perceptions of time are much more acute at lower registers, while our ability to distinguish changes in pitch gets much better in the upper ranges, which is why, writes Nature, “saxophonists and lead guitarists often have solos at a squealing register,” and why bassists tend to play fewer notes. (These findings seem consistent with the physics of sound waves.) To reach their conclusions, Trainer and her team “played people high and low pitched notes at the same time.” Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalogram that measured brain activity in response to the sounds. The psychologists “found that the brain was better at detecting when the lower tone occurred 50 MS too soon compared to when the higher tone occurred 50 MS too soon.”

The study’s title perfectly summarizes the team’s findings: “Superior time perception for lower musical pitch explains why bass-ranged instruments lay down musical rhythms.” In other words, “there is a psychological basis,” says Trainor, “for why we create music the way we do. Virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments.” University of Vienna cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch has pronounced Trainor and her co-authors’ study a “plausible hypothesis for why bass parts play such a crucial role in rhythm perception.” He also adds, writes Nature:

For louder, deeper bass notes than those used in these tests, people might also feel the resonance in their bodies, not just hear it in their ears, helping us to keep rhythm. For example, when deaf people dance they might turn up the bass and play it very loud, he says, so that “they can literally ‘feel the beat’ via torso-based resonance.”

Painfully awkward revelers at weddings, on cruise ships, at high school reunions—they just can’t help it. Maybe even this dancing owl can’t help it. Some of us keep time better than others, but most of us feel and respond physically to low-frequency rhythms.

Bass instruments don’t only keep time; they also play a key role in a song’s harmonic and melodic structure. In 1880, an academic music textbook informed its readers that “the bass part… is, in fact, the foundation upon which the melody rests and without which there could be no melody.” As true as this was at the time—-when acoustic precursors to electric bass, synthesizers, and sub-bass amplification provided the low end—it’s just as true now. And bass parts often define the root note of a chord, regardless of what other instruments are doing. As a bass player, notes Sting, “you control the harmony,” as well as anchoring the melody. It seems the importance of rhythm players, though overlooked in much popular appreciation of music, cannot be overstated.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Charles Darwin’s Kids Draw on Surviving Manuscript Pages of On the Origin of Species

in Art, Science | October 22nd, 2015

Charles Darwin not only created the theory of evolution, but he apparently dabbled often in human biology and sexuality. To wit: he fathered 10 children with his cousin Emma Wedgwood, six boys and four girls. It was this boisterous brood that filled the Darwin’s house in rural Kent, England, while Charles worked in his study on the first draft of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, his groundbreaking, world-changing work.

Last year we reported on the huge effort to digitize 30,000 pages of the scientist’s writing at the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History. Among Darwin’s many papers, one thing the digitizers have found, curiously enough, is artwork drawn by his children, often on pages of Darwin’s manuscripts.

Darwin had no real use for the original manuscript once galley proofs came back from the publisher. So one can imagine father Charles giving his kids the only worthwhile paper in the house to draw on. It seems flippant now, but at the time, it was perfectly normal.

According to the New Yorker, they’ve found 57 drawings in total, nine of them on the back of pages from Origin of Species. Only 45 manuscript pages out of 600 from that book survive, and those nine are because of his kids. You can find a whole section at the Darwin Manuscripts project website dedicated to the drawings of the Darwin kids.

Researchers surmise that the majority of the art comes from three of the 10 children, Francis, George, and Horace, all of whom went into the sciences as adults. The illustrations are colorful and witty, drawn in pencil and sometimes colored in watercolor. Birds and butterflies are drawn and colored with attention to detail. Some creatures are imaginary, like the green fish with legs carrying an umbrella, and there are short stories about fairies and battles too.

Overall, the drawings show a Darwin who was a family man and not a reclusive scientist. We’re just glad that the kids let dad do his work in relative silence.

19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873)

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Wonders If It’s Triggered by Parallel Universes

in Physics, Psychology, Science | October 19th, 2015

I’ve spent the past week on a road trip across America, and, during it, experienced perhaps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Memphis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lobby of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and immediately felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lobby before. But I then realized exactly why: it followed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same business center computers, the same café with the same chalkboard asking me to “Try Our Classic Oatmeal” — of the one I’d visited the previous day in Oklahoma City.

Should we chalk this up to generic American placemaking at its most efficient, or can we find a more interesting psychological phenomenon at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. “There is a theory,” says Kaku in the Big Think video above,“that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced.”

But wait! “Is it ever possible on any scale,” he then tantalizingly asks, “to perhaps flip between different universes?” And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a “multiverse” in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: “If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency.” And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once.

Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist “no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes,” when “we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them.” It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ultimately grants that “déjà vu is probably simply a fragment of our brain eliciting memories and fragments of previous situations,” you may get a kick out of putting his multiverse idea in context with some more traditional explanations, such as the ones written about in venues no less dependable than Scientific American and Smithsonian. But in any case, I beg you, Marriott Courtyard hotels: change up your designs once in a while.

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Periodic Table of Elements Scaled to Show The Elements’ Actual Abundance on Earth

in Chemistry, Science | October 8th, 2015

When you learned about The Periodic Table of Elements in high school, it probably didn’t look like this. Above, we have a different way of visualizing the elements. Created by Professor William F. Sheehan at Santa Clara University in 1970, this chart takes the elements (usually shown like this) and scales them relative to their abundance on the Earth’s surface. In the small print beneath the chart, Sheehan notes “The chart emphasizes that in real life a chemist will probably meet O, Si, Al [Oxygen, Silicon and Aluminum] and that he better do something about it.” Click here to see the chart — and the less abundant elements — in a larger format. Below we have a few more creative takes on the Periodic Table.

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via Pickover

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Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd

in Education, Philosophy, Science, Technology | October 6th, 2015

Founded and directed by physicist Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State’s Origins Project has for several years brought together some of the biggest minds in the sciences and humanities for friendly debates and conversations about “the 21st Century’s greatest challenges.” Previous all-star panels have included Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking has graced the ASU Origins Project stage, as has actor and science communicator Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, highly-anticipated Origins Project event, Krauss welcomed Noam Chomsky to the stage for a lengthy interview, which you can watch above.

Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero worship in his laudatory introduction, he nonetheless finds himself asking “What Would Noam Chomsky Do” when faced with a dilemma. He also points out that Chomsky has been “marginalized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anarchist political views. Those views, of course, come widely into play during the conversation, which ranges from the theory and purpose of education—a subject Chomsky has expounded on a great deal in books and interviews—to the fate of political dissidents throughout history.

Chomsky also gives us his views on science and technology, particularly in the Q&A portion of the talk above, in which he answers questions about artificial intelligence—another subject he’s touched on in the past—and animal experimentation, among a great many other topics. Krauss mostly hangs back during the initial discussion but takes a more active role in the session above, offering views on medical and scientific ethics that will be familiar to those who follow his atheist activism and championing of rationality over religious dogma.

What you won’t see in the video above is a conversation Chomsky and Krauss had with Motherboard’s Daniel Oberhaus, who caught up with both thinkers during the ASU event to get their take on what he calls “another great space race.” As Oberhaus makes clear, the current competition is not necessarily between global superpowers, but—as with so much modern research and development—between public and private entities, such as NASA and Space X. As we briefly discussed in a post yesterday on the huge amount of public domain space photography freely available for use, private space exploration makes research proprietary, mitigating the potential public benefits of government programs.

As Chomsky puts it, “the environment, the commons… they’re a common possession, but space is even more so. For individuals to allow institutions like corporations to have any control over it is devastating in its consequences. It will also almost certainly undermine serious research.” He refers to the example of most modern computing—developed under publicly-funded government programs, then marketed and sold back to us by corporations. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space exploration as the cost-effective option, and both thinkers discuss the problem of militarizing space, the ultimate goal of Cold War space programs before the fall of the Soviet Union. The conversation is rich and revealing and makes an excellent supplement to the already rich discussion Krauss and Chomsky have in the videos above.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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8,400 Stunning High-Res Photos From the Apollo Moon Missions Are Now Online

in Photography, Science | October 5th, 2015

The Apollo program, launched in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, flew its first manned mission in 1968, and the following summer, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin met the program’s mandate, making their historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing. In the ensuing few years, several more spacecraft and crews either orbited or landed on the Moon, and for a brief moment, popular magazines and newspapers regularly featured photographs of those expeditions on their covers and front pages. Looking every bit the authentic vintage Hasselblad photos they are, the images you see here were taken by Apollo astronauts on their various missions and sent home in rolls of hundreds of similar pictures.

These astronauts snapped photos inside and outside the spacecraft, in orbit and on the moon’s surface, and in 2004 NASA began digitizing the resulting cache of film. Luckily for the public, devoted space enthusiast and archivist, Kipp Teague—an IT director at Lynchburg College in Virginia—has posted a huge number of these photos (8,400 to be exact) on his Project Apollo Archive Flickr account.

Teague initially began acquiring the photos in collaboration with Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, “a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.” Understandably, so many people expressed interest in the photographs that Teague reformatted them in higher resolution and gave them their own home on the web. The Planetary Society informs us, “every photo taken on the lunar surface by astronauts with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras is included in the collection.”

While Teague and Jones’ other sites use photos that have been processed to increase their clarity, lighting, and color, the photos on Project Apollo Archive remain in their original state. “Browsing the entire set,” writes the Planetary Society, “takes on the feeling of looking through an old family photo album.” Indeed, especially if you grew up in the late-sixties/early-seventies at the height of the space program’s popularity.

A good many of the photos are rather procedural shots of craters and clouds, especially those from earlier missions. But quite a few frame the breathtaking vistas, technical details, and awestruck, if exhausted, faces you see here. So many photos were taken and uploaded in succession that clicking rapidly through a photostream can produce an almost flipbook effect. You can browse the archive by album, each one representing a reel from different Apollo missions—including that famous 11th (top, and below)—though Teague has yet to post high resolution images from Apollo 8 and 13.

It seemed after Apollo’s demise in the mid-seventies that photographs like these documented a lost age of NASA exploration, and that the once-great government agency would cede its innovative role to private companies like Elon Musk’s Space X, who have been much less forthcoming about releasing media to the public, making proprietary claims over their space photography in particular. But thanks in part to Space X and the cooperation of Canadian, European, Russian, and Japanese space programs, NASA’s International Space Station has raised the agency’s public profile considerably in the past several years. Though still painfully underfunded, NASA’s cool again.

Even more profile-raising is the Mars Rover program, whose recent finding of water has refueled speculations about life on the Red Planet. As films like the recent, astronaut-approved The Martian and a raft of others show, our collective imagination has long bent toward human exploration of Mars. Establishing a base on Mars, after all, is Space X’s stated mission. Looking at these stunning vintage photos of the Apollo Lunar missions makes me long to see what the first astronauts to walk on Mars send back. We probably won’t have to wait long once they’re up there. We’ll likely get Instagram uploads, maybe even some with fake vintage Hasselblad filters. It won’t be quite the same; few current events can compete with nostalgia. But I like to think we can look forward in the near future to a renaissance of manned—and woman-ed—space exploration.

See many hundreds more Apollo Lunar Mission photos at Project Apollo Archive and follow the archive on Facebook for updates.

via The Planetary Society

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Adam Savage’s Animated Lesson on the Simple Ideas That Lead to Great Scientific Discoveries

in Astronomy, Math, Physics, Science, TED Talks | October 2nd, 2015

Educator, industrial design fabricator and Myth Busters cohost Adam Savage is driven by curiosity.

Science gets his wheels turning faster than the notched disc Hippolyte Fizeau used to measure the speed of light in 1849.

In his TED-Ed talk on how simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries, above, Savage zips across the centuries to share the work of three game changers — Fizeau, Eratosthenes, and Richard Feynman (one of the de facto patron saints of science-related TED talks).

I found it difficult to wrap my head around the sheer quantities of information Savage shoehorns into the seven minute video, giving similarly voluble and omnivorous mathmusician Vi Hart a run for her money. Clearly, he understands exactly what he’s talking about, whereas I had to take the review quiz in an attempt to retain just a bit of this new-to-me material.

I’m glad he glossed over Feynman’s childhood fascination with inertia in order to spend more time on the lesser known of his three subjects. Little Feynman’s observation of his toy wagon is charming, but the Nobel Prize winner’s life became an open book to me with Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick’s excellent graphic biography. What’s left to discover?

How about Eratosthenes? I’d never before heard of the Alexandrian librarian who calculated the Earth’s circumference with astonishing accuracy around 200 BC. (It helped that he was good at math and geography, the latter of which he invented.) Inspiration fuels the arts, much as it does science, and I’d like to learn more about him.

Ditto Fizeau, whom Savage describes as a less sexy scientific swashbuckler than methodical fact checker, which is what he was doing when he wound up cracking the speed of light in 1849. Two centuries earlier Galileo used lanterns to determine that light travels at least ten times faster than sound. Fizeau put Galileo’s number to the test, experimenting with his notched wheel, a candle, and mirrors and ultimately setting the speed of light at a much more accurate 313,300 Km/s. Today’s measurement of 299792.458 km/s was arrived at using technology unthinkable even a few decades ago.

Personally, I would never think to measure the speed of light with something that sounds like a zoetrope, but I might write a play about someone who did.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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The Drawings & Paintings of Richard Feynman: Art Expresses a Dramatic “Feeling of Awe”

in Art, Physics, Science | September 10th, 2015

I first encountered bongo-playing physicist Richard Feynman in a college composition class geared toward science majors. I was not, mind you, a science major, but a disorganized sophomore who registered late and grabbed the last available seat in a required writing course. Skeptical, I thumbed through the reading in the college bookstore. As I browsed Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—the first of many popular memoirs released by the affable contrarian scientist—the humanist in me perked up. Here was a guy who knew how to write; a theoretical physicist who spoke the language of everyday people.

Feynman cultivated his populist persona to appeal to those who might be otherwise turned off by abstract, abstruse scientific concepts. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, his name has come to stand for the best examples of popular science communication. It is often through one of Feynman’s accessible, non-specialist books or presentations that people learn of his work with the Manhattan project, his contributions to quantum mechanics, and his Nobel Prize. But Feynman’s extracurricular pursuits—from safe-cracking to drumming to experimenting with LSD—were also genuine expressions of his idiosyncratic character, as was another of his passions for which he is not very well known: art.

Feynman took up the pursuit at the age of 44, and continued to draw and paint for the rest of his life, signing his work “Ofey.” Many of his drawings display the awkward, off-kilter perspective of the beginner, and a great many others look very accomplished indeed. In an introductory essay to a published collection of his artwork, Feynman describes what motivated him to take up this particular avocation:

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.

As you can see above, he took his work seriously. Most of his drawings consist of portraits and nudes, with the occasional landscape or still life. You can see more extensive galleries of Feynman’s art at AmusingPlanet, Museum Syndicate and Brain Pickings.

Feynman’s preoccupation—and full immersion—in the relationship between the arts and sciences marks him as a Renaissance man in perhaps the purest definition of the term: his approach closely resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci, a likeness that comes to the fore in the work below, which is either a collection of sketches doodled over with formulae, or a collection of formulae covered with doodles. Either way, it’s a perfect representation of the visionary mind of Feynman and his regard for ordinary language, people, and objects—and for “scientific awe.”