"Listen" music with the skin, netizens put on this equipment to listen to the concert: as if living in the piano

发 发 | Public account QBITAI

I believe everyone has heard of the story of Beethoven's deafness.

"To Alice", "Heroes Symphony", "Symphony of the Pastoral" and other works are all classics.

Have you ever wondered, how did he do it?

In the junior high school physics class, the teacher told us: Beethoven, who lost hearing, bite one end of the wooden stick with his teeth, and the other end was on the piano to experience the vibration of the piano and insist on creation.

And now, the latest research of scientists has also confirmed this: music can not only listen, but also touch!

Even deaf musicians can understand the complex emotions of music transmission through touch.

You can enjoy music if you can't hear it

For those with normal hearing, when the vibration of a specific frequency (20Hz-20000Hz) is transmitted through the air and captured by the tiny sensitive cells in the cochlea, we can hear the sound.

But in fact, the sound can also be felt by touching.

If you have been to the frenzy concert scene, you can feel that those exciting music not only impacts your eardrum, but even drives your body to sway.

That's right, the skin can directly feel the pressure generated by the sound waves. At the same time, the sound waves can also pass through the guitar paddles, stage flooring, etc., and can be passed on to the human hands, feet, body, and even deeper into the bones and inner cavity walls (such as lungs and chests. The film between).

Therefore, when listening to the concert, some hearing impaired people will use their hands to tighten the balloon surface to better feel the music through the vibration of thin rubber.

Frank Russo, a professor of psychology and musician of Toronto City University, also found in the study that people who can't hear their ears are often more sensitive.

In the brain of hearing impaired people, the hearing cortex is often reorganized in other ways. It re -connects signals from other sensory, such as tactile and vision.

Especially for those who are deaf acquired, the entire brain will be adjusted to adapt to hearing loss. For example, a neural network that involves attention is discovered and coordinated movement, visual systems and memory neural networks are closer.

The advantage of feeling music through touch is that touching the rhythm can effectively pass the rhythm. Russo found through the comparison of electrocardiogram, whether it is listening or touching through the ears, the rhythm of the music feels is basically the same.

Not only that, touch can also feel other information in music, such as can feel the volume changes through the amplitude.

As for whether you can feel the complex emotions in music, Russo said: Most of them can be felt. Specifically, there are more emotions for low -frequency vibration, while high -frequency vibration sounds no emotion.

Byron Remache-Vinueza from the University of Malaga describes this feeling:

Switching the music from the sound to the vibration is like changing the best dish made by a mother into soup. The two are just a different experience.

It is worth mentioning that as of now, the method of feeling music with touch has changed the lives of many hearing impaired people.

Change the technology of life

The Musical Vibrations at the University of Liverpool is an organization that specializes in providing equipment that converts music into vibrations. The organization has provided their technology to the deaf rapper Sigzkid.

The research team introduced one of his songs into the device, converting the sound of guitar, kicking drums, and small military drums into vibration, letting SIGNKID step on two vibers, and feel music through his heels and front feet.

"I like this," SIGNKID told the music vibration team, "This can really give me confidence."

In the end, SIGNKID used the device that the team lent to him to produce his personal EP "Visual Experience".

The vibrator is just a simple operation. A healthcare company has designed a wearable device -tied a series of sensors to the back, shoulders, waist, ankles, and wrists. It can be used to enlarge and transmit vibrations of different frequencies.

This set of equipment has been tested at a concert in the center of Las Vegas. The hearing impaired people participating in the test said that they felt that their bodies became musical instruments and music was being played through these instruments.

△ From YouTube@not impossible

After a hearing -impaired person experienced the third movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", he said that he was like "living in the piano".

However, although the music has been verified through the touch of the touch, some problems have been encountered in the process.

Still need to be improved

The first problem encountered by touching the music with touch is: the frequency of music and the frequency of vibration cannot be completely corresponding.

Compared with our ears, the sound of 2000Hz-5000Hz is the most sensitive, but the sound range of vibration transmission is usually between 5Hz-1000Hz.

This means that many ears can hear treble cannot be captured by touch, or cannot be accurately identified. On the contrary, we can feel some bass with touch, even if we can't hear them.

The second obstacle to converting existing music into vibration is how to distinguish different sounds.

Mark Fletcher at the Institute of Southampton's Institute of Vibration and Vibration said that many technologies can only handle music with independent sound rails that have been divided into different instruments, and it is difficult to "decompose" complex music.Even the most advanced algorithm, it is difficult to solve the stronger vibrations now to cover other vibrations, and different instruments will change at any time in a song.

If there is no powerful method to separate different instruments, and compile a balanced signal in the form of vibration, it will not be able to identify the subtle difference between music from vibration.

One of them, although these technical problems are still yet to be resolved, the invention of this technology has brought about the changes in the lives of listeners.

The research team of the University of Liverpool has brought their vibration equipment to a deaf school.

Teachers feedback like this:

The students were even more invested in music classes. The children really liked it. A boy always came back and knocked on the door and asked: "Can I play again?"

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