Blue Jay Sounds

[Agenor Ramadan]

Vibrantaccessible, surprising, and always colourful bravura piano works. music of originality and merit performed with total confidence, evangelical fervour, and pianistic precision, realised with regal authority by the magnificent Tom Hicks. Strongly recommended.

This CD explores both sounds and colors in a wide variety of ways [with] well-executed effects, all of which Hicks brings out very clearly indeed. Listeners intrigued by contemporary keyboard works performed with genuine flair will find much here to enjoy.

The correlation between light and sound has been theorised abundantly. This is not a new phenomenon, being explored by Isaac Newton in the 17th century. In a letter to the Royal Society in 1675 Newton pondered whether rays of light emitted certain vibrations or frequencies:

I suppose, that as bodies of various sizes, densities, or tensions, do by percussion or other action excite sounds of various tones & consequently vibrations in the Air of various bigness so when the rays of light, by impinging on the stiff refracting superficies excite vibrations in the aether, those rays, whatever they be, as they happen to differ in magnitude, strength or vigor, excite vibrations of various bigness; the biggest, strongest or most potent rays, the largest vibrations & others shorter, according to their bigness strength or power.

Blue. The colour of isolation, or solitude, its various gradients moving from despair to quietude; it is the colour that sits between ourselves and others, a distance that cannot be known or measured.

The question as to whether the vibrations of light can be translated in audible terms is still debated today. An interesting 2004 study by Wichita State University investigated the integration of auditory and visual sensory information:

I have one hooked up to my system. The DAC is nowhere near as good as the one on the Chord Hugo I was using. But that device was only bluetooth, which is the worst, and having the convenience of streaming on the Node makes it a much better stereo component for the price.

Both mojo and Hugo1 are powered by internal batteries but both can run plugged in and charging via the mains. I use both in my 2 systems running off battery power and only need to charge them once a week on average. When not in use I switch them off.

A bit of a faff but absolutely worth it for the sound

I think Chord could at one point change the batteries if/as they deteriorate. The Mojo battery is fairly rare, but I think the twin cells in the Hugo are a lot more standard. Permanently powering the early ones was the cause of some of that battery deterioration. Charging and discharging them (not running them totally flat/charging them fully) probably extends battery life a bit, versus keeping them permanently powered/connected. Lots of info out there about this too.

I would like a Nain streamer, for the convenience, but after listening to the ND5 XS2 against the Hugo, I think a NDX2 would be needed to significantly better it. And the slight inconvenience is more than compensated for by the sounds they make whilst I save up!

Imagine listening to a Mozart concerto and seeing it pass before your eyes in a stream of colors and shapes; imagine reading Proust when each letter has a particular color, each word like a little impressionist painting; imagine sitting in class, trying to pay attention to a lecture but distracted by little black circles that pop into your mind each time the person sitting next to you clicks his pen. Trying to imagine any of this might seem strange, but for a person with synesthesia this type of strange is routine. Research on synesthesia has accelerated since the 1980s, and has revealed a great deal about different types of synesthetic experiences and their prevalence, as well as the genetic components of synesthesia, and its neural correlates.

Synesthesia is a condition in which two or more senses are automatically and involuntarily coupled. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more senses are automatically and involuntarily coupled. Letters and numbers may be colored. Simple geometric shapes, colors and even taste or a sense of touch might accompany sounds; and number sequences might fall into specific patterns and orientations in space.

To what extent do the brains of synesthetes vary in cortical activity and connections compared to non-synesthetes? In 2002, Nunn et al. found that brain areas specific to color perception in the visual cortex, are activated in the left hemispheres of synesthetes by spoken words, as opposed to control subjects, who showed no such activity, even when asked to imagine colors in response to spoken words and trained on word-color associations.4 Researchers have also demonstrated that, compared to controls, there is increased structural connectivity in the brains of synesthetes in areas important for sensory perception like the fusiform gyrus, the left intraparietla suclus (IPS) and the frontal cortex.5,6,7

One study using EEG, found that synesthetes have marked amplitude differences in early sensory-perception in response to simple visual stimuli. Areas in the brain responsible for transferring color information from the eyes to the visual cortex (the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus) are more active in synesthetes when they are shown colorful stimuli. On the other hand, when stimuli are low-contrast, black and white patterns, synesthetes showed less activity in these early areas than non-synesthetes.8 This study along with those mentioned above, suggests that there are extensive differences in cortical circuitry in synesthetes compared to non-synesthetes.

Exactly how many people have synesthesia? It depends on which study you look at. A 1993 survey of two nonrandom London populations came up a prevalence of 1 in 2,000 and 1 in 2,500. In Germany surveys put the likelihood of having synesthesia at 1 in 300, and classroom surveys in the United States initially put the number at 1 in 200. However, in 2005 Julia Simner and colleagues in Edinburgh assessed a large random sample of two populations, a university and a science museum, and found the prevalence to be 88 times higher than previously assumed: 1 in 23 for any type of synesthesia.10

In 2008, Simner et al. studied Synesthesia in context of developmental questions. They found a significant number of synesthetes in the childhood population, even in children as young as six-years-old. Their study put the prevalence of grapheme-color synesthesia (seeing letters in colors) in children at 1.3%, over 170,000 children (0-17) in the UK, and over 930,000 in the USA.11 Are you one of 930,000?

If you are, chances are that one of your family members also experiences synesthesia, so ask them. In 2005, Ward and Simner looked at inheritance patterns of synethesia in seventy-two families and proposed that it may be inherited on the X chromosome from the mother. The X-linked claim has been contested, but scientists are still interested in finding the genetic components that cause synesthesia.12

The fact that a number of important artists were synesthetes (Kandinsky and Leonard Bernstein are just two) and the fact that these multimedia experiences are so engaging, suggests that synesthesia have very different insights about aesthetics. One study, headed by Dr. Jamie Ward or London X, implies that the sensory coupling that occurs in synesthetes may explain our tendency to like certain aspects of movies. Ward et al. found that non-synesthetes were significantly more likely to enjoy animations when they were based on the experiences of synesthetes than when they were based on random or non-synesthete experience.13 Interestingly, one study in 2010 showed a higher prevalence of synesthesia in a group of art students than in a control group.14

What is the future of synesthesia research? There is a lot of evidence that synesthesia is a product of cortical disinhibition, and it is likely that future experiments will try to validate this and incorporate it into more general theories of multisensory cognition. For example, a region of the brain called the claustrum, located in the basal ganglia, has been implicated in multisensory integration and synesthesia, but what is the function of the claustrum? Future research on synesthesia is also likely to focus on the cognitive effects of hypnosis, since hypnosis may reveal important aspects of disinhibition.

It is important to recognize that studies of synesthesia in cognitive neuroscience represent a desire to move toward understanding individual experiences. It is important to remember in neuroscience that each brain is a little different, and it is necessary to pay attention to those individual details in order to better understand synethesia and human cognition more generally.

Blue whales produce stereotyped calls throughout the year. These calls have been described as pulses, grunts, groans, and moans, and are typically in the 15-40 Hz range, often below the threshold of human hearing. In addition to being some of the lowest frequency animal sounds produced, blue whale vocalizations are also recognized among the most intense. The source level of a vocalizing Antarctic blue whale has been estimated to be 189 underwater dB.

All the different colors of sound vibrate at different frequencies, and their names are loosely analogous to the colors of light. For example, white noise emits all of the frequencies audible to human ears, just like white light contains all of the colors of light visible to the human eye.

Don't confuse the colors of sound with ambient noise, which refers to the background noise present in any given setting; for instance, the rumble of a train mixed with passenger chatter, or the rustle of leaves in the wind mixed with the chirping of birds.

The legacy of sleep sounds, white noise has lulled people to sleep for ages. Because white noise encompasses all of the frequencies any person can possibly hear (from about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz), it holds the potential to block out any outside sound.

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