Music you feel

A Brunel university student has put together a prototype of a ‘feeling music’ device. This device transmits the sound vibrations into the fingertips of the deaf ‘listener’ so they can discern the musical structure.

I’m not sure how well this would work, but then there’s always a big emotional impact when you feel the vibration of loud bass standing next to a speaker at a club. Perhaps at a larger scale this would be more impactful? I’m also reminded of the movie “It’s all gone Pete Tong” about the Superstar DJ who loses his hearing.

On the subject of sound and movies, last night at Superfilm we watched Evil Dead II, the B movie classic horror that launched Sam Raimi. What I’d never appreciated about that movie before was the sheer genius of the soundtrack. Crappy special effects and OTT dialog were cranked up to full fear factor simply by having minimal backgroud music, moments of intense silence, then sudden increases in volume or small skittering noises. Amazing. Plus the left/right channels were reversed in our viewing room which I think helped intensely – the characters would point to something coming from the left and suddenly you’d hear an un-anticipated noise to your right. Boo!