A Brief Study of Binaural Beat: A Means of Brain-Computer Interfacing

The human brain tends to follow a rhythm. Sound has a significant impact on our physical and mental health. This sound technology uses binaural beat by generating two tones of marginally different frequencies in each individual ear to facilitate the improved focus of attention, emotion, calming, and sensory organization. Binaural beat helps in memory boosting, relaxation, and work performance. Again because of hearing a binaural beat sound, brainwave stimuli can be diagnosed to pick up a person’s sensitive information. Using this technology in brain-computer interfacing, it is possible to establish a communication between the brain and the computer. Thus, it enables us to go beyond our potential. The aim of this study is to assess the impact and explore the potential contribution of binaural beat to enhancement of human brain performance.

Rhythm Quantization: Notes on the History of a Technocultural Practice

This chapter sketches a general history of rhythm quantization as a widespread practice in popular music culture. Quantization—a sound technology that automatically maps microrhythmic fluctuations onto the nearest beat available within a predefined metric grid—challenges traditional notions of musicking as an embodied activity that is grounded in the co-presence of human agents. At the same time, it encapsulates cultural and cognitive processes that are entirely human, fitting into a broader historical shift towards chronometric precision in Western music. Questions arising from this apparent contradiction are taken up in this chapter, which situates rhythm quantization as an emergent technocultural practice, examining its attendant technologies and requisite structures of music-theoretical knowledge, as well as its reception within the context of different musical genres.

Sound, Technology, and Culture in French Indochina

In the 1920s, European radio enthusiasts organized clubs in Hanoi, Saigon, Hai Phong, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh. Periodicals and letters from the time provide insights on this burgeoning amateur radio culture. Members shared experiences, debated the potential of the technology, and used radio to broadcast records of music, story-telling, and other forms of light entertainment. Chapter 1 examines how these radio clubs were established in the urban centers of French Indochina and how they impacted cultural life in the colonial territories. The chapter begins with a consideration of cultural colonialism, broadcasting technology, and music in the French Empire. Archival sources provide evidence on the styles of music and recording technologies in circulation in early twentieth-century mainland Southeast Asia, when telegraphy, phonograph recordings and radio broadcasts informed the social construction of state and empire. Exclusive membership regulations of the Indochinese radio clubs, which restricted most of the indigenous population, were undermined during the Japanese occupation (1940–45). And the Japanese promotion of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken) followed by a famine in 1944–45 fomented unrest among the indigenous population. During the August Revolution of 1945, the Viet Minh and other insurrectionaries commandeered these sound reproduction technologies to broadcast news of their uprising.

Evaluation of Eucalyptus growth with application of homeopathic preparation

The use of less impacting techniques in agricultural systems is the global trend, so the use of High dilutions on these systems has been studied as ecologically sound technology. This study had the object to study the interaction between the High dilutions and the development of Eucalyptus urophylla S. T. Blake seedlings. Was conducted from May 2007 to July 2007, in the greenhouse of the Department of Plant Science at the Federal University of Viçosa. Applications were made in one day intervals and preparations utilized were: Phosphorus, Calcarea carbonica, Kali muriaticum, Magnesia carbonica, in dynamizations 3CH and 12CH and water and alcohol dynamised CH3. Morphological parameters of quality seedlings were analyzed over time and the end of the experiment. The prepared Kali muriaticum 12CH promoted increased root length of approximately 55% compared to control water . The prepared Phosphorus 3CH differed from other treatments in the green total mass variable. The High dilutions Phosphorus 3CH and Kali muriaticum 12CH promoted increase in root growth. The responses obtained with the application of Phosphorus 3CH indicate the viability of agronomic use to the increase of the root exploration and absorbing elements necessary for plant growth.

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History

In evaluating the success of twenty-first-century applications of surround sound technology, the popular press often fails to take into consideration the powerful role that history plays in their design. Dolby Atmos for Cinema (2012 –) has been marketed as groundbreaking and become a gold standard in cinema sound. Conceived of as a means to create a “platform” that would reach across the movie theatre, home theatre, music, and virtual reality for maximal profit, however, Atmos was always designed to move beyond it. Discussing both Atmos for Cinema and Atmos for Music (2016–), and drawing on first-hand interviews with industry insiders, this chapter situates Dolby’s platform into a longer history of multimedia surround technologies, and argues that its contribution to that history is first, in its reflection of the underrecognized hybridity of surround sound’s past, and second, to think of surround sound as a space to physically move through.

Sonic Cyberfeminisms, Perceptual Coding and Phonographic Compression

I argue that sound-centric scholarship can be of use to feminist theorists if and only if it begins from a non-ideal theory of sound; this article develops such a theory. To do this, I first develop more fully my claim that perceptual coding was a good metaphor for the ways that neoliberal market logics (re)produce relations of domination and subordination, such as white supremacist patriarchy. Because it was developed to facilitate the enclosure of the audio bandwidth, perceptual coding is especially helpful in centring the ways that patriarchal racial capitalism structures our concepts and experiences of both sound and technology. The first section identifies sonic cyberfeminist practices that function as a kind of perceptual coding because they subject ‘sound’ and/or ‘women’ to enclosure and accumulation by dispossession. The second section identifies a type of sonic cyberfeminism that tunes into the parts of the spectrum that this perceptual coding discards, building models of community and aesthetic value that do not rely on the exclusion of women, especially black women, from both humanist and posthuman concepts of personhood. Here I focus especially on Alexander Weheliye’s ‘phonographic’ approach to sound, technology and theoretical text. This approach, which he develops in his 2005 book of that title and in recent work in collaboration with Katherine McKittrick, avoids fetishising tech and self-transformation and focuses on practices that build registers of existence that hegemonic institutions perceptually code out of circulation. I conclude with examples of such phonographic compression, including Masters At Work’s ballroom classic ‘The Ha Dance’ and Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’.

The Effect of Geometric Sound on Physical Matter, Brain Waves and Well Being and its Application for Advanced Medicine

This study introduces Geometric Sound as an emerging subfield of Spatial Sound and proposes a new and non-invasive method for the treatment of various illnesses of both physical and psychological characteristics, with emphasis on stress related conditions and neurological impairments. The approach relies on presenting auditory stimuli that are mathematically defined geometric structures propagated in space, using advanced spatial sound technology. This study examined the effects of Geometric Sound on physical matter by cymatic emergence, providing insights on projection of Geometric Sound through Faraday waves. With these insights in mind the effects of Geometric Sound on brain waves was studied, considering the brain as physical matter for wave propagation. Finally, we analyzed the related effects on emotional well being by behavioural analysis. The study is inspired by vibrational medicine, focusing on sound frequencies produced by tuning forks and propagated in mathematically defined 3D geometrical structures of spatial sound using 4DSOUND technology. A novel finding of this study shows that Geometric Sound affects matter and that the same sound frequencies played in different geometric shapes and measured under identical conditions produce correlating cymatic images to the geometric shape they were projected in. In terms of the effect on brain waves, Geometric Sound was found to affect both power amplitude, connectivity patterns and topology of brain waves, as compared to base condition and control. Results of the emotional effects show that Geometric Sound has a positive effect on well being, reduces stress and improves sense of relaxation according to behavioral response and as measured by heart rate and blood pressure of participants. Therefore, Geometric Sound may be used as a tool for treatment of various illnesses and disabilities such as depression, anxiety, stress related disabilities and dysfunctionalities, and impairments related to head injuries and trauma.