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RANGE_OF_HEARING

                                             January 11, 2010

Central to the vinyl-cd controversy is
our understanding of the range of human          COOL_WARMTH
hearing.

I sometimes wonder about the conditions
that were used to determine the range of
human hearing.

Any hearing test I've taken used
relatively quiet tones wearing clamshell
headphones in an isolated sound booth.

Actual listening conditions are often
much different, e.g. speaker stacks in
a large room, at much louder volumes.           VISION

What if you can "hear" at
very low frequencies, but       I draw an analogy to
with your body, not your        another controversy:
ears?                           physicists were once
                                dogmatic about the      The resolution of the
What if you can hear very       impossibility that a    controversy: we needed
high frequencies but only       pianist's "touch"       to get over the idea
at very high volumes?           could matter.           that only the strings
                                                        in a piano make noise.
But then, that sounds like a
pretty obvious experiment.

One Of These Days I'm going to
try to look up what's been done.
                                        Matthew Goodheart of the Bay
                                        Area New Music list points
                                        me to the "Hypersonic effect":

                                        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_effect

                                            Apparently it's a known
                                            phenomena that people
                                            can detect "hypersonic"
                                            sounds, though they
                                            can't quite percieve
                                            notes the way they can
                                            in the "sonic" range.



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