‘Looking to get your sound effect on? Well look no further than these awesome sound effect rings created by designer duo RGB (Shuji Tomishima and Takushi Okina). Who would have thought that sound effects, when expressed through katakana characters, would look so appealing on your fingers?
Prices range from smaller characters (ッ) going for 7,612 yen to larger characters (ド・ゴ・ハ・ガ) for 23,100 yen. They’re available through Mitsubai Tokyo.
While we get stuck with developing a few Technologies, our ancestors,be it any civilization, went far ahead of us and developed Technologies that are amazing.
‘Waller knew that echoes played a role in many ancient myths, such as Native American tales of sprites who speak through portals in rock walls. In 1994 he conducted an acoustical survey of Horseshoe Canyon, a three-mile-long chasm in southeastern Utah decorated with eerie pictographs. Waller hiked the canyon, pausing at 80 locations to snap a noisemaker fashioned from a rat trap and record the echoes. After processing the results with sound analysis software, he found that five spots displayed powerful echo effects. Four corresponded to the locations of paintings that Waller had encountered. When he asked experts about the fifth, they explained that it, too, bore artwork, though the pictographs were not visible from the path he had followed. Since then, Waller has repeated the experiment at hundreds of rock art sites around the world, almost always finding a correlation between image and echo. He speculates that ancient artists “purposely chose these places because of sound.”….
The most detailed evidence of ancient acoustical design comes from the Stanford team studying Chavín de Huántar, which was constructed between 1300 and 500 B.C. Peruvian archaeologists first suspected the complex had an auditory function in the 1970s, when they found that water rushing through one of its canals mimicked the sound of roaring applause. Then, in 2001, Stanford anthropologist John Rick discovered conch-shell trumpets, called pututus, in one of the galleries. The team set out to determine what role the horns played in ancient rituals and how the temple may have heightened their effects. Archaeoacoustics researcher Miriam Kolar and her collaborators played computer-generated sounds to identify which frequencies the temple most readily transmits. Over years of experiments, they found that certain ducts enhanced the frequencies of the pututus while filtering out others, and that corridors amplified the trumpets’ sound. “It suggests the architectural forms had a special relationship to how sound is transmitted,” Kolar says. The researchers also had volunteers stand in one part of the temple while pututu recordings played in another. In some configurations, the sound seemed to come from all directions.
El Castillo pyramid in Mexico.
If a person stands at the bottom of the Castillo and shouts, the sound will echo as a shriek that comes from the top of the structure. If someone stands on top and speaks in a normal voice, they can be heard on the ground at a distance of 150 metres away. At Palenque, also in Mexico, it is apparently the case that if three people stand on top of the three pyramids, a three-way conversation can easily be held.
El Castillo pyramid in Mexico, built by the Mayans some 1,100 years ago, bears four stepped sides, each vertically bisected by a staircase. If you clap your hands at the pyramid’s base, you hear a series of chirps. Locals near similar pyramids have long compared the sound to the cry of the quetzal, a bird venerated by the Mayans. In the 1990s acoustician David Lubman recorded the hand-clap echoes at El Castillo and compared them with recordings of the quetzal. He found that recordings and sonograms of several echoes really do match the bird’s cry. Lubman says the echo “is a powerfully robust phenomenon” unlikely to have resulted by accident.’
‘They are surely the most horrifying offshoot of modern technology – nuclear warheads which can smite hundreds of thousands of people dead within seconds, and leave lasting scars on a landscape for generations.
And while most of us will have seen archive footage of nuclear explosions before, one thing we are unlikely to have heard is their sound.
For, according to one expert, most films we see of a nuclear blast use stock ‘explosion‘ sound effects for the bang – and audio footage is few and far between.
The historian was sent the video below from a Russian colleague, and has now shared it on his blog.
Wellerstein wrote: ‘Most films of nuclear explosions are dubbed. If they do contain an actual audio recording of the test blast itself (something I’m often suspicious of — I suspect many were filmed silently and have a stock blast sound effect), it’s almost always shifted in time so that the explosion and the sound of the blast wave are simultaneous.
‘This is, of course, quite false: the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound, and the cameras are kept a very healthy distance from the test itself, so in reality the blast wave comes half a minute or so after the explosion. Basic physics that even a non-technical guy like me can understand.
‘It’s rare to find footage where the sound has not been monkeyed with in post-processing. So I was pleased when a Russian correspondent sent me a link to footage digitized by the National Archives of a 1953 nuclear test. The footage is very raw: it hasn’t been edited much, and is a bit washed out, but the audio is still in “correct,” original sync.’
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