How's It Sounding?

If you’re like me, you find yourself doing many tedious tasks that often take a bit of time.  This could be creating some document on a computer, or soldering some cables together.  Either way, there comes a time where you find yourself looking at the clock and wondering why time has slowed down.  You’re losing interesting, and productivity has slowed down.

For me personally, I have found listening to specific music doesn’t exactly help me focused, but it helps the time pass faster, and I whine less about the work I have to do.  However, not just any music did it (nothing new to anyone, but just hear me out).  If there were lyrics, I would get distracted and sing.  So I found movie or videogame soundtracks worked the best.  Then I started playing a group of soundtracks, and my productivity increased, and my mental fatigue decreased.  I present to you, my soundtracks of choice: Back to the Future, Part I, II, and III.

Robert Alexander is a “Data Sonification Specialist”.  That is an awfully fancy term right?  Well it simply means that he takes any type of data and turns it into sound.  A basic example of this would be a heart rate monitor.  That “beep, beep, beep” sound that you hear is essentially the sonification of someone’s pulse.  This is very basic though.  Alexander takes this to the extreme.

No one likes the sound of nails on a chalkboard right?  It makes you cringe, cover your ears, and ask why someone did that.  Now what if you feel even worse than that every day, but to an extensive amount of day to day sounds?  What if you become angry, get headaches, cry, or slam your head into the wall saying “make these sounds go away”?  While this may sound like a crazy person, it’s actually a disorder called misophonia.

Now, I am not a medical professional, so take this only as information and not medical advice.  Misophonia is literally, “the hatred of sound”.  And no, I did not make this up.  People with misophonia can become enraged by a simple auditory trigger.  These “triggers” are things we all hear in our day to day lives: texting, chewing, pen tapping, laughing, and the like.  When people with misophonia hear these triggers, they cannot help the feelings of anger, emotional distress, and/or anxiety they feel.

I recently watched a TED speech given by the self proclaimed “artist and geek” Evan Grant on what’s called cymatics.  Cymatics is the visualization of sound.  Here is an example bellow:

Evan Grant did a wonderful job about explaining this topic that I had seen, but didn’t see a purpose for.  If you are interested in audio, you have probably seen this example on YouTube with a metal plate, sand, and a driver, or at least videos like it.  I always thought it looked cool, and I knew what caused it, but what purpose could it serve?