Bass Profoundo
(Reuters) "In the first controlled experiment of infrasound, Lord and Wiseman played four contemporary pieces of live music, including some laced with infrasound, at a London concert hall and asked the audience to describe their reactions to the music. The audience did not know which pieces included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music."
Dr Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in England and Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England, built a seven meter pipe and snuck it in the back of a church during the Sunday session and experimented on the reaction of the attendees to the sub-20 Hertz sound.
There is some suggestion even that infrasound -- which may also occur naturally -- is responsible for the general creepy crawling sensation one gets in places that are considered haunted, leading to the conclusion that the "haunting" is the result of some localized natural phenomenon. Not to mention the fact that low-end sound has probably been experimented with by the US Military for some time, nor can we pass up the nod to The Swans and Throbbing Gristle who used it at more than once concert setting.
And, speaking of localized versions of infrasound, Reuters also notes today that scientists have discovered that the Perseus Cluster has been singing a bass note for billions of years, not that anyone could ever hear the B flat note which the celestial object is humming. The Perseus Cluster is about 250 million light-years from Earth.
Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, England, has been using NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory to gather information about the contents of the Perseus Cluster and have deduced that a supermassive black hole lay at the center. The discovery of the B flat note -- which is 57 octaves below middle C -- lends credence to existence of the superdense black hole.
By watching the Perseus Cluster, they've been able to detect concentric waves coming off the black hole, the result of gases being squeezed and heated before being drawn into the center of the hole. These concentric waves are pressure ridges which are the same thing as sound waves to the scientific mind. Measure the distance between crests and you've got a musical note. In this case, the wavelength was about 30,000 light years, or B flat -- 57 octaves down.
Not that anyone can hear it. Not even elephants who are known to communicate with extremely low level basso tones. Current guess is that this is the lowest note in the universe. This black hole is the Alan Cooper of the universe.