Experiment:Hearing musical ideas through white noise.

[foosnark]

When I was a kid, I used to listen to road noise / boat engine noise on trips, zone out and experience something between hearing melodies in it, and internally harmonizing with it. It was kind of a euphoric feeling a couple times. But that definitely wasn't white noise, it was complex but had pitched elements.

[annode]

When I was a kid, I used to listen to road noise / boat engine noise on trips, zone out and experience something between hearing melodies in it, and internally harmonizing with it. It was kind of a euphoric feeling a couple times. But that definitely wasn't white noise, it was complex but had pitched elements.

Thanks for sharing that with us foosnark.
This experiment will use pure noise for obvious reasons, but any sort of 'masking' sound could do it I suppose.With me, at school at least,I heard music in my head all the time.It was predominate as I remember.
I`ll guess that when we get older or something,other things in our subconscious jockey for position. The mind becomes more specialized for life.
We stop singing and start worrying. The masking noise with random musical sound possibly nudges our subconscious mind into singing again.

But that definitely wasn't white noise, it was complex but had pitched elements.

The noise i`m talking about is just a tool, not the music we hear in our mind. It`s a distracting tool so the mind can`t get a sure fix on the radio songs. Because all the sounds in the song are always changing in pitch and volume level, the addition of noise causes those variations to add and subtract with the noise causing phase cancellations and such. So what we`re left with is a randomization of the organized sound.
The mind will try to re-organize it into music.

[Ben.B]

When I was in junior high school, I remember having random musical sound(rhythm and melody) running in my head when I was in class.Not songs getting stuck in my brain, but just random stuff.I remember not being able to concentrate in class because of it. One day I asked my teacher about it...don`t remember what he said...but that is what this experiment is about...in essence.
BTW, I lost the music when I developed my new interest in Cannabis in 8th grade.

I know I can imagine musical sound(rhythm and melody)when driving with the radio on and the windows full open with the radio on any station with the volume so low it was just about audible with the wind blowing in.
In other words, I could here random sounds from the radio but not recognize the song, even if I knew it. My brain starts creating music.
What I want to do is do that same thing using radio and white noise through a mixer into headphones. I suspect the brain will do it`s thing and create music by filling in the gaps from the random sounds it hears from the radio and in turn, try to find a way to 'record' those 'ideas' into the DAW seqr.

Just go at it, then listen back to see if any of it is worth building upon.
So why not just record playing randomly then? I suspect it won`t be the same.

If anyone wants to try this, please report back what happens.

I have tinnitus in the right ear. One sound is very high pitched, but I can forget about it. The other is a low frequency drone; sometimes varying in loudness. This one can be nasty when it's time to sleep!

My brain picks up rhythms and melodies out of it, stuff begins to loop, etc, but it can get very annoying and cause insomnia. I found that turning on a fan besides my bedroom helps a lot to even things (I guess the fan covers another range of frequencies). Still, my brain hears music and sometimes even words out of the noise, although it's less annoying that way and I get to sleep more easily.

Well, as much as I like music, I would love to turn that shit off! Doctors are still unsure of the origin of such tinnitus, but one said that common sounds like the wind coming through a car full open windows and other unsuspected pressure and decibel sources can sometimes damage the hearing of predisposed persons over time. So, I wish you fun with your noise experiments, but watch your levels.

[annode]

Hi Ben.

I have tinnitus in the right ear. One sound is very high pitched, but I can forget about it. The other is a low frequency drone; sometimes varying in loudness. This one can be nasty when it's time to sleep!

My brain picks up rhythms and melodies out of it, stuff begins to loop, etc, but it can get very annoying and cause insomnia. I found that turning on a fan besides my bedroom helps a lot to even things (I guess the fan covers another range of frequencies). Still, my brain hears music and sometimes even words out of the noise, although it's less annoying that way and I get to sleep more easily.

Well, as much as I like music, I would love to turn that shit off! Doctors are still unsure of the origin of such tinnitus, but one said that common sounds like the wind coming through a car full open windows and other unsuspected pressure and decibel sources can sometimes damage the hearing of predisposed persons over time. So, I wish you fun with your noise experiments, but watch your levels.

I also have tinnitus in my right ear, although it`s minor and comes only if it`s aggravated. Aspirin or digital high frequency sound. I have the high pitch and the low like you. The low strikes me at bed and sometimes mornings. When it`s quiet, like at bedtime, it sounds like I can hear the neighbor`s washing machine running through the wall.
I`m lucky it`s not a problem for me. Sorry to hear about yours.

Once I got a really bad case of ear ringing that took a day or so to calm down. This was yrs before I had any tinnitus. Wearing Sennheiser headphones I was injecting an audio sine wave into a hi-fi receiver I was repairing. At one point I had the sine generator frequency somewhere beyond 20k. I saw it on the oscilloscope but I couldn`t hear it. Since I didn`t hear it, I went ahead and turned the amp volume way up to check something. It was like that for minutes. Then at one point my ears started ringing and it got really loud! I literally tore the phones off my head.

I didn`t associate the ringing with what I was doing cause I wasn`t hearing any sound. But the truth is,the ear must be able to mechanically hear above 20k but we aren`t able to perceive it consciously.
Any case, enough on tinnitus. It`s all interesting but too far off topic to continue the subject...thanks.

But no, I don`t get the music effect when the tinnitus is happening, guess I don`t have it turned up loud enough.

Heard a song on the radio tonight. By chance it really reminded me of what my brain used to do when it would go off 'singing'/'improvising'... say...with the car radio just perceivable.
(the song below) Notice how everything is 'all over the place'. As if the brain is dancing through scales in relation to the other scales being played by the other instruments. It`s musically correct and structured, but sounds almost random. Let me know if this sort of thing is familiar to you.


...and lastly,again tonight, I watched a program about the brain and how it perceives reality. It touches on similar ideas. Here is the trailer...the full show should be available on Youtube in a few days.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365572212/

[camsr]

Ultrasonics can do ear damage. If you can't hear it, filter it out!

[stonestreet]

Hi Anode,
Thanks for posting "It's Gonna Rain." Listened to it early morning and it is great. Probably better at the end of the day after the assault of the day's noise.

I also enjoyed that video clip "How the brain creates reality" Based on this you may like the essay "On Constructing a Reality" by Heinz von Foerster. I lifted the earlier quote from this essay where he claims that the environment as we perceive it is our invention.

Have fun

Laters.

[annode]

Hi Anode,
Thanks for posting "It's Gonna Rain." Listened to it early morning and it is great. Probably better at the end of the day after the assault of the day's noise.

I also enjoyed that video clip "How the brain creates reality" Based on this you may like the essay "On Constructing a Reality" by Heinz von Foerster. I lifted the earlier quote from this essay where he claims that the environment as we perceive it is our invention.

Have fun

Laters.

Hey stonestreet
I read most of the abstract yesterday, and a bit more today.
I`m afraid I haven`t gotten anything useful from it concerning this experiment.The abstract is seriously wordy and beyond my realm of interest on that subject, so it`s hard to grasp and apparently beyond this topic.

I encourage you to process that abstract, present any conclusions you come up with concerning this topic specifically.

Thanks,
Barry.

[Ben.B]

Hi Ben.

I have tinnitus in the right ear. One sound is very high pitched, but I can forget about it. The other is a low frequency drone; sometimes varying in loudness. This one can be nasty when it's time to sleep!

My brain picks up rhythms and melodies out of it, stuff begins to loop, etc, but it can get very annoying and cause insomnia. I found that turning on a fan besides my bedroom helps a lot to even things (I guess the fan covers another range of frequencies). Still, my brain hears music and sometimes even words out of the noise, although it's less annoying that way and I get to sleep more easily.

Well, as much as I like music, I would love to turn that shit off! Doctors are still unsure of the origin of such tinnitus, but one said that common sounds like the wind coming through a car full open windows and other unsuspected pressure and decibel sources can sometimes damage the hearing of predisposed persons over time. So, I wish you fun with your noise experiments, but watch your levels.

I also have tinnitus in my right ear, although it`s minor and comes only if it`s aggravated. Aspirin or digital high frequency sound. I have the high pitch and the low like you. The low strikes me at bed and sometimes mornings. When it`s quiet, like at bedtime, it sounds like I can hear the neighbor`s washing machine running through the wall.
I`m lucky it`s not a problem for me. Sorry to hear about yours.

Once I got a really bad case of ear ringing that took a day or so to calm down. This was yrs before I had any tinnitus. Wearing Sennheiser headphones I was injecting an audio sine wave into a hi-fi receiver I was repairing. At one point I had the sine generator frequency somewhere beyond 20k. I saw it on the oscilloscope but I couldn`t hear it. Since I didn`t hear it, I went ahead and turned the amp volume way up to check something. It was like that for minutes. Then at one point my ears started ringing and it got really loud! I literally tore the phones off my head.

I didn`t associate the ringing with what I was doing cause I wasn`t hearing any sound. But the truth is,the ear must be able to mechanically hear above 20k but we aren`t able to perceive it consciously.
Any case, enough on tinnitus. It`s all interesting but too far off topic to continue the subject...thanks.

But no, I don`t get the music effect when the tinnitus is happening, guess I don`t have it turned up loud enough.

Heard a song on the radio tonight. By chance it really reminded me of what my brain used to do when it would go off 'singing'/'improvising'... say...with the car radio just perceivable.
(the song below) Notice how everything is 'all over the place'. As if the brain is dancing through scales in relation to the other scales being played by the other instruments. It`s musically correct and structured, but sounds almost random. Let me know if this sort of thing is familiar to you.


...and lastly,again tonight, I watched a program about the brain and how it perceives reality. It touches on similar ideas. Here is the trailer...the full show should be available on Youtube in a few days.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365572212/

Yes, sorry for the off-topic part on my tinnitus example. Well, I got even more off-topic after reading your response, because while searching about ultrasonics, I was reminded of something I forgot about: that some ultrasounds at a high volume can even cause death (by hemorrhage of small blood vessels in the brain!), but you're right, all of this hasn't much to do with your subject.

I listened to Esperanza Spalding Radio Song. Not really my cup of tea, but there's some serious jazzy arrangements at work in it for sure. The instrumental (and vocal) parts are all bouncing one unto the other, coming and going in an intricate interlaced way. Now, the rhythms and melodies I hear in diverse sources of noise are quite less complex, but yes, I think I get a bit of what you mean about these sort of brain «random» states of improvising over noise/music.

You wrote about this thing happening in your car with the radio at a low volume. A similar effect happens to me when my daughter listens to music with headphones in the car. There's some sound bleeding out of the headphones, but not enough for me to discerns which songs are playing exactly, so my brain sort of fills the blanks. Most often, it's not a very conscious thing where I make precise musical stuff out of it though (that I will remember or transform in a recorded piece later), but more like hearing music in a public space, such as a grocery or something, without «actively» listening to it. Sometimes, I definitely feel and hear rhythms and vague melodic structures, but without thinking too much about them. In fact, when I stop to analyze this phenomenon more consciously, I gradually lose the effect. So, to reproduce this in a DAW, I would have to let my mind floats and when something musical materializes, hurry up to catch the idea, because when too much thought is put into it, from my experience, the idea simply vanish. A bit like when you wake up after a dream and you have a hard time remembering precisely what it was all about.

Finally, I often transform (or use the actual source) of a variety of «noises» into musical rhythm and phrases (washing machine loops or mechanical motor noises, etc.) But these noises are not entirely made up by the brain, so they don't disappear when I try to turn them into musical motifs.

Not sure if what I just wrote will make much sense to you, but I wish you better success at transforming such brain-made improvised ideas into satisfying music for you.

[stonestreet]

Hi Anode,
Thanks for posting "It's Gonna Rain." Listened to it early morning and it is great. Probably better at the end of the day after the assault of the day's noise.

I also enjoyed that video clip "How the brain creates reality" Based on this you may like the essay "On Constructing a Reality" by Heinz von Foerster. I lifted the earlier quote from this essay where he claims that the environment as we perceive it is our invention.

Have fun

Laters.

Hey stonestreet
I read most of the abstract yesterday, and a bit more today.
I`m afraid I haven`t gotten anything useful from it concerning this experiment.The abstract is seriously wordy and beyond my realm of interest on that subject, so it`s hard to grasp and apparently beyond this topic.

I encourage you to process that abstract, present any conclusions you come up with concerning this topic specifically.

Thanks,
Barry.

Hi Annode,

That quote in my earlier reply to your OP is a quote of a quote. The author Heinz von Foerster quoted that text as one example in support of his claim that the environment as we perceive it is our in invention.
The quoted text seemed to me to describe similar activities. I understood your activity to create order out of chaos. In the quoted text on 'alternates' the observer perceives differences even though presented with a loop of the same stimulus. The result is that our brains create our meanings.

As you posted a link to a video about how brains create reality I thought that you may have an interest in cognition. Well Heinz von Foerster was well into cognition and founded the Biological Computor Laboratory. In his essay he mentions other experiments that indicate his view that perceiving is doing. His conclusion is "reality = community."

If I have misunderstood your post I am sorry.

Mark

[xoxos]

listen to this

http://xoxos.net/temp/dbfs14pre.mp3

what do you hear



here's a video i poosted last week


of course, these timbres were realised with this process


xoxos

[annode]

@ stonestreet
Hi stonestreet. It occurred to me shortly after I wrote it that I failed to say that the bit on 'alternates' did fit well into this topic. I wish there was more on that I could read.
As for the rest of that "On Constructing a Reality" by Heinz von Foerster, I thought as a whole from the 700+ pages of it I believe it said were written, but not available to me, it was too broad in it`s focus for this topic. I`m only trying to keep this topic from going astray.

As you posted a link to a video about how brains create reality I thought that you may have an interest in cognition. Well Heinz von Foerster was well into cognition and founded the Biological Computor Laboratory. In his essay he mentions other experiments that indicate his view that perceiving is doing. His conclusion is "reality = community."

The show I linked to was just an invite to watch it when it becomes available. I said that it "touches on similar ideas".

Please, no more about such a broad concept as reality.

[annode]

listen to this

http://xoxos.net/temp/dbfs14pre.mp3

what do you hear



here's a video i poosted last week


of course, these timbres were realised with this process


xoxos

In what way does this relate to the topic? Maybe i`m missing something?

[annode]

@ Ben.B.
Hi Ben.

that some ultrasounds at a high volume can even cause death (by hemorrhage of small blood vessels in the brain!)

Thinking back to that event, I remember ripping those phones off my head as if they had spiders in them.I remember the loud tone came on quickly and like a wave. I was very scared. It was no laughing situation.

Ok, no more tinnitus.
EDIT - oops, hit save before I was done responding...be back to finish.

[Ben.B]

EDIT - oops, hit save before I was done responding...be back to finish.

Haha, no problem. I'm not sure that my story is very relevant in relation to what you're trying to do anyway, but your noise experiment intrigued me, so maybe I'll try something like that in a DAW at some point.

[annode]

...continued from above;

I listened to Esperanza Spalding Radio Song. Not really my cup of tea,

That shouldn`t matter, but it actually might. I was an avid jazz fan through the 70s. Does that determine what my mind will do as it 'improvises' in a "noise can"? Not known at this time.

The instrumental (and vocal) parts are all bouncing one unto the other, coming and going in an intricate interlaced way. Now, the rhythms and melodies I hear in diverse sources of noise are quite less complex, but yes, I think I get a bit of what you mean about these sort of brain «random» states of improvising over noise/music.

Cool, I was hoping someone could see that. The complexity issue is an unknown for now. One thing that stands out to me in that song is the dissonance. I think that might be a typical mental expression when listening to noise...but that`s just a guess at this time.
Noise and musical dissonance are closely related.

Sometimes, I definitely feel and hear rhythms and vague melodic structures, but without thinking too much about them. In fact, when I stop to analyze this phenomenon more consciously, I gradually lose the effect

I hope to find that when in a "noise can", like an 'isolation both' with noise, focus is important in order to collect what you want to retrieve and save.
I didn`t need to be in a vague state of alertness to hear and imagine phases and such.

So, to reproduce this in a DAW, I would have to let my mind floats and when something musical materializes, hurry up to catch the idea, because when too much thought is put into it, from my experience, the idea simply vanish. A bit like when you wake up after a dream and you have a hard time remembering precisely what it was all about.

Yeah, i`m very confident it won`t be like that using the noise cans.
Retrieving and saving will have to be worked out.(assuming all this works)
For example...as you listen to the injected musical source, it will also be recording. Say if you hear something you want to inspect because it triggered a mental phrase you want to retain, you will be able to playback that section as a loop. You will be able to loop your mental phrase over and over as you save it somehow to DAW. There will need to be tools like this to assist in the saving process.
I know from multiple listens to an MP3 of my composition which happens to have enough harmonic interaction within it as to produce other musical phrasings not deliberately put there, I hear the same mental images over and over each time I hear that same "triggering section". So capturing a loop,in a noise can session, will trigger the same mental image as your first impression.(retrieving)

I have to get my ass in gear and do this!!!
Thanks for participating Ben.