DailyDirt: Listening To The Sounds of Silence (And Other Noises)
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Temporary hearing loss is not an uncommon experience after going to a loud music concert. It can almost be funny when you're talking too loud because you can't hear yourself, and thankfully, the ringing in your ears after a loud show usually goes away. People sometimes take their ability to hear for granted, but it's an important sense, and here are just a few interesting links on listening that you might want to check out before you need a hearing aid.- The world's quietest room (AKA an anechoic chamber) is so quiet that it can cause people to start hallucinating and become disoriented by the lack of auditory feedback. Your brain is accustomed to a fair amount of background noise, so when it's deprived of nearly all ambient sounds, you'll find that peace and quiet are not as related as you might think. [url]
- MRI scans can measure how annoying some sounds are, and surprisingly "nails on a chalkboard" isn't the worst. If you want to listen to "knife on a bottle" to hear the most annoying sound (out of the 74 sounds that were tested), be prepared to cringe. [url]
- People with Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) really like to listen to people whispering and making soft scratching noises. When the experience is triggered, it's reported to feel like a "brain tingle" -- and there are a bunch of YouTube channels that cater to these folks. [url]
- According to some researchers, the shape of your skull might actually influence your musical preferences. The effect is subtle, but the resonant structure around the cochlea can affect the perception of sounds. (Remember that the next time you're thinking about buying really expensive headphones...?) [url]
Filed Under: anechoic chamber, asmr, autonomous sensory meridian response, hearing, music, noise, quiet, senses, skull, sounds
