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Chapter 4: Projecting sounds into human bodies

The difference between the aural and physical experience of sound

Coming back to the introduction of this thesis; the physical experience of sound is
what ties together my interest in all former topics in this paper. You can imagine that as a
club music producer, one of the key elements to making a track fulfil its purpose is to make
the track “feel” good. That means to shape the lower frequencies in such a way that the
physical experience that comes with playing back sounds at a high amplitude adds value to
the composition. Often, this music even feels like it is taken completely out of context once it
is played back in a non-club environment, which to me indicates how much added value the
immersive character of the physical experience of sound adds.
I believe that only since the birth of the club music era the idea of the physical
experience of sound came to life as a separate entity from the aural experience. The
opportunity for musicians to experiment with this on such a large scale led to the emergence
of a myriad of (sub)genres. Many of these genres come with their own prerequisite
instrumentation and compositional choices, which influences producers of that genre to
shape the low frequencies in a specific way. It also happens often that these genres stick to a
very narrow range of tempo because movements in frequently used rhythmical patterns
would otherwise be less effective. These genres experiment with the same set of parameters
so often that it leaves us with lots of information and reference material related to the field of
physically experiencing sounds.
Essentially, by projecting sounds into human bodies, waveforms become the patterns
with which these bodies are displaced. This opens up a whole new world from which the
features of a composition can be perceived. It introduces more factors for which we could
question our compositional choices, because sounds with tonal information, specific
harmonic patterns, partials, dynamics, contrast and spatiality are suddenly registered to the
brain from a completely different perspective. Actively making choices on where and whether
the physical and the aural experience should overlap is something that truly interests me.

The role of low frequencies in the physical experience

When I think of sounds that I can feel with my body, the first thing that comes to
mind is bass. Anything which I can perceive with my ears in between roughly 20 to 150 Hz is
what I consider bass. I don’t differentiate between whether the sounds in that frequency
band are tonal or not. Classically trained musicians might consider the boundaries of the
bass register to be something different. However, to stay true to the nature of the topics

37
discussed, I set these alternative boundaries that don’t reach as high in the frequency
spectrum.
I think lower frequencies are better at displacing objects or human bodies, because
the pressure fluctuations they create are slower relative to the same amount of mass they
have to displace. If we see the amplitude of a waveform as a force that can move objects, then
it makes sense to think it's easier for that force to displace a mass 30 times per second
(30Hz) rather than a thousand times per second (1kHz). For this reason, the dance music
industry puts great emphasis on bass frequencies. Producers try to seek the very limits on
how low you can go in pitch, and how that changes your perception of the weight of a sound.
To emphasise this, the harmonic content above a chosen fundamental frequency is often
manipulated.
It should also be noted that it is always risky to push these boundaries, because not
every system where you play back your music is able to reproduce these kinds of frequencies.
This is especially true if you work with low sine waves that don't fluctuate in pitch. This
might mean that you will have an unrealistic representation of what the music should convey
to the audience. This can be due to limitations of the frequency response of a speaker, or
standing waves in a space.

Figure 15. The SUBPAC (“WHAT IS SUBPAC? - SUBPAC” 2021)

38
 To leave nothing to the imagination of the composer, a company called SUBPAC
started to develop a piece of equipment which they self-titled “SUBPAC”. It is essentially a
big transducer that can be mounted on the back of a chair or backpack (Figure 15). It is built
to literally make you “feel” fluctuations in the pressure of an audio input signal (“WHAT IS
SUBPAC? - SUBPAC” 2021). This allows even producers like me who exclusively use
headphones to monitor low frequency information in detail. It truly resembles the feeling of
standing right in front of a big subwoofer in a club. Other than a tool to monitor, this product
has been used in cars, gaming chairs, cinema and virtual reality setups, thereby enhancing
the experience at hand.
Personally, I'm using the SUBPAC to experiment with the lower frequency sound
sensation, and how my perception changes when I hold the SUBPAC against different parts
of my body. The closer the transduction takes place to my bones (for instance, my spinal
column), the more intense the sensation becomes throughout the rest of my body. Because
harder materials tend to transduce sounds better, I think our bone structure plays a pivotal
role in how the resonances of the human body are perceived.
The lower the frequencies that resonate the body, the more they start to resemble
simple patterns of movement. A DC offset of a signal can simply be seen as a speaker cone
being offset in a single direction, which can be translated to a human body moving in a single
direction. If the frequency of a waveform becomes low enough to the point that its harmonics
indicate a very consistent rhythmical pattern forcing the body in a specific direction, then
this might hint at why people like to dance to sounds of low frequencies so much.
In fact, research conducted by scientists from Western Sydney University supports
exactly that hypothesis. Their study published in 2018 showcases that bass sounds may
exploit a neurophysiological mechanism that triggers large pools of neurons to synchronise
to the sound of the musical beat (Lenc et al. 2018). They found that bass-heavy music
successfully locked the brain into the rhythm, as the lower frequencies boost selective neural
locking to the beat (Newman 2018). Interestingly, the experiment showed that volume does
not play a role in this phenomenon.

The sensation of weight created by low frequency pitch bends

In the process of working with sine wave based low frequency sound content, I
learned a lot about how to manipulate their pitch characteristics in ways that are both
efficient and effective in a compositional context. I've already briefly mentioned that
sometimes it's risky to put sine waves without any pitch modulation in music because it can
easily be misinterpreted. However, in the process of meticulously adding pitch bend
modulations to sounds, I came to the conclusion that the gesture of these sounds easily

39
resemble something with an impact-like nature. It made me question why my brain would
simply perceive this gesture as such, even when it was not my intention to link this to an
imaginary quality. Hence, I came to believe that it's interesting to think about sine waves
pitching down as a very rudimentary form of certain sounds that occur in nature.
As earlier discussed, a sound like the example of a kick drum can be broken down
into two parts, which elaborate on the very essence of the sound: a transient and a resonant
body. I found that a lot of sounds which resemble the impact similarly have the inherent
relationship of transient and body embedded. More examples of these are the sounds of
objects being hit, explosions, sonic booms, thunder, amongst others (Figure 16).

Figure 16. Waveform representation of the sound of a slamming door, an explosion, distant
thunder and a sonic boom caused by an F-16 jet. They show the amplitude characteristics of
an impact. The sonic boom presents the increase in high frequency content at the moment
of impact most clearly out of the four examples.

Because we as evolved human beings have experienced their sounds numerous times
throughout history, our aural capabilities easily let us identify them. For the sake of survival
it has been essential to be able to accurately identify these impact-like sounds. I think this is
part of the reason why we associate them with large, heavy or dangerous entities.
In the book “Sonic Warfare, Sound Affect and the Ecology of Fear” Steve Goodman
explores the production, transmission and mutation of affective tonality, which extrapolates

40
on the idea of these psychoacoustic effects of discomfort (Goodman 2010). He uses more
examples like the sonic boom, or high frequency tones used against teenagers in public
spaces to express how its acoustic force affects populations.
If I now link this idea back to the story in the introduction of this paper, where I as a
teenager froze upon hearing a loud low frequency sound seeping through the door of the
auditorium in the distance, I can understand my initial response and the rush of adrenaline
it evoked. It might be due to this very evolutionary build of the human mind and body that in
a modern age people have a reaction that can be described as contradictory. On the one
hand, when hearing such impact-like sounds you immediately are on edge to look out for the
source of potential danger. On the other hand, you as a listener know the source of the
sounds and are even in full control of being in that environment, willingly exposing yourself
to the situation. This conflicting feeling is to many an ecstasy-evoking experience, so this
might explain why the modern public finds it thrilling to participate in such musical events.

The bodily reaction to the resonance of pure, diffused and noisy signals

Continuing on the idea that the waveform of a sound is the pattern with which the
body is displaced, it makes timbre or texture a major deciding factor for how we feel a sound.
The physical experience that comes with the nature of different sounds like sine waves,
sounds with complex tonal qualities, impacts or noise bursts, will therefore greatly differ. For
instance, I experience sine waves to be static and continuous, where band-filtered noise at
the same frequency of the sine wave implies much more movement and indeterminate
texture.
During the writing of this thesis I was also experimenting with the SUBPAC to
enhance the immersiveness of field recordings, which I was listening to distract myself from
noises outside my office. When I was playing back a field recording I made when sitting on
top of a dry cleaner (I find that sound very relaxing), it dawned on me that to effectively
capture the sound and play it back in another setting, translating the physical movement that
the body is being put through, makes a crucial difference. Similarly, we can use a field
recording of a train ride as an example. Listening back to that recording at a later point
creates a much more realistic and tangible experience, if it is played back with equipment
like the SUBPAC where you are able to physically feel the texture of the low frequencies.
Similarly, judging from club experiences of industrial techno events, the main driving
force of the music is the indeterminate textural experience of a repeated movement in the
kick drum. On the micro scale, the complexity of this movement forms a very specific theme
that will be repeated until the listeners’ hearing attenuates to the frequencies in that
movement. On the macro scale, the expectations that come with the attenuation of the ears

41
will be exploited by creating tension at the right time. This is practised by taking out these
movements, followed by creating contrast through the introduction of new music. Music with
simpler instrumentation and less sounds allow the audience to focus more on individual
sounds. This in turn enhances the intensity with which contrast is perceived and thus felt.
If a sound is projected at you from a distance, the different reflections that alter the
identity of a sound will also change the physical feeling experienced. As such, the club,
festival or other loud, real-world performative experiences are unique in how their sounds
can be perceived. Being able to alter the soundscape by walking around, turning your head,
hearing people's movement, and simply being in a social environment make that even more
evident.
Needless to say, the 2021 global pandemic in regards to Covid-19 made us realise this,
and made many electronic music producers like myself question the format of their
compositions. The duality between the at-home and field experience has never been greater
since the birth of club music, since all events during this phase have been strictly prohibited
by the government. This creates even more distance between the experience of music felt by
the composer versus the consumer, with the exception of the very few music enthusiasts who
own hi-end home equipment. The lockdown has, nevertheless, opened up a myriad of new
possibilities, namely online streaming or virtual reality environments which became
increasingly popular throughout the last months of this pandemic. These alternatives might
not be perfect for replacing the physical experience of sound, however, they can help retain
the social aspect and the feeling of presence that comes with real life events. Although this
creates numerous obstacles, artists and promoters of events luckily see this as an opportunity
to learn new methods and develop their skill set. I am positive that the emergence of these
creative alternatives will inevitably outgrow the short-term benefits and will bring various
creative sectors together to overcome their limitations.

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Conclusion

To reflect on how the propagation of sound can be creatively exploited, this thesis
started by looking into some fundamental ideas that relate to my personal experience and
interest in music. Hence, the first chapter introduced examples of creative projects that
involved the propagation of sound by various means and in different spaces.
The chapter of space introduced the concept of projecting sounds into different
spaces, particularly how it influences our process of composition and performance. It also
brought to light how the compositional process can be influenced in such a way that a
reverberant environment will not pose a problem in conveying a musical message. It was
explained that this is done by choosing sound material of which the compositional function
overlaps with the inherent qualities of the sound. It also elaborated on the topic of
convolution and how it can be exploited in a digital environment to emulate real world sound
characteristics.
In the chapter after that, the functionality of objects and their advantages as
resonators were discussed. I also highlighted the idea of the two-dimensional perception that
comes with using these “membranes” as a medium to process our sounds through. One of the
key advantages of using physical objects as resonators is their nonlinear frequency response,
and their ability to exponentially increase in spectral complexity when a myriad of objects
interact.
In the last chapter the physical experience of sound was discussed in the context of
low frequencies and psychoacoustic phenomena related to our perception of pitch bends.
Human bodies act as filters in the way that they resonate along to low frequencies, caused by
the physical displacement of a sound. I was surprised to find evidence of my theory on the
synchronisation between the low frequency sounds and patterns in movements of humans.
Through practical experience I developed an interest in the overlap of the aural and physical
sensation that comes with playing back a composition with a high amplitude.
All in all, it comes down to that the main question of the paper can’t really be
answered completely, only be pursued to be answered partially. Like mentioned in the
introduction, I enjoy the journey that comes with research, even if it does not lead me to a
straight answer. I intend to pursue finding more answers to all questions I asked myself in
this paper in my professional environment from this bachelor onwards.
However, this research led me to believe that I’m personally not interested in creating
pieces that only display themselves as a pure embodiment of a concept, and nothing more. A
piece like Alvin Lucier’s “I’m sitting in a room” to me, feels like a rare occurrence in music for
the reason that it only requires a single concept that decides every detail of the piece. In my
experience of trying to compose pieces like this, I often ran into the problem that a single

45
concept was not enough to avoid creating a one-dimensional sound product as a result.
Therefore, I came to believe that it is important to sometimes have no reasoning for
compositional choices, but rather have these concepts embody a single aspect of a
composition amidst other ideas and sounds, which together represent the full form of a
piece. The next logical step after concluding that all of these phenomena related to the
propagation of sound through membranes exist is to put multiple of these phenomena
together to see how they interact.

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