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University of Kent / ARTS STUDIO
Although music is an accepted part of
everyday life, scientific research raises lots of
questions about our relationship with our
favourite tracks. Why are we so dependent on
music? Is our relationship with our MP3 players
harmful? And could we do with a bit more
silence?
If you would like to know more about music
research and what you might learn as a
science undergraduate in the School of Arts,
read on.
THE HISTORY OF NOISE
Road traffic and aeroplane noise make silence
hard to find and we often think of the past as a
quieter place. But, if we go back to before the
Industrial Revolution, we just find a different
kind of noise. Horses drawing carts, merchants
shouting their wares, the thud of a blacksmith’s
trip-hammer, and the noise of abundant wildlife
mean that the countryside may be as quiet now
as it has ever been.
TECHNOLOGY
This complex auditory environment has
influenced the evolution of the human brain.
This means that we are very good at focusing
on what we want to hear, and tuning out all the
background noise. Understanding how our
brains hear sound can help us create ultrasmall
music recordings such as MP3s.
MP3 files are typically up to 90% smaller
than uncompressed audio such as a CD. MP3
compression works by comparing a sound
recording with how our hearing systems work,
and throwing away the sounds we wouldn’t
hear.
We couldn’t hear many of the discarded
sounds even if we wanted to. We only hear the
lower and highest frequencies in our hearing
range when they are comparatively loud, so
MP3 compression discards quiet sounds at
those pitches. We hear best at middle
frequencies – those pitches that make up
speech and sung vocals – but even here some
quiet sounds are masked by similar loud
sounds, so MP3s discard those quiet sounds
as well.
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