Healing House I: A Material Phenomenology of Illness

This paper is a deep investigation into one art installation, Healing House I, which materializes the lived experience of being diagnosed with a chronic illness. This artwork is part of a collaborative project between artist Darian Goldin Stahl and her sister, Devan Stahl, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Together, they use a phenomenological methodology to express the disconnections between the lived body and the body object that can occur after a diagnosis, as well as the conditions necessary to mend this separation. Joining fleshy material, sound, vibration, and scent in this artwork, Goldin Stahl analyses how a multi-sensory and artistic interpretation of her sister’s illness narratives can tacitly communicate one experience of living with MS. In sharing this artwork with others in a disability arts exhibition, the sisters aim towards fostering a collective, intercorporeal understanding and empathy for the ill body.

Seagrass Posidonia is impaired by human-generated noise

The last hundred years have seen the introduction of many sources of artificial noise in the sea environment which have shown to negatively affect marine organisms. Little attention has been devoted to how much this noise could affect sessile organisms. Here, we report morphological and ultrastructural changes in seagrass, after exposure to sounds in a controlled environment. These results are new to aquatic plants pathology. Low-frequency sounds produced alterations in Posidonia oceanica root and rhizome statocysts, which sense gravity and process sound vibration. Nutritional processes of the plant were affected as well: we observed a decrease in the number of rhizome starch grains, which have a vital role in energy storage, as well as a degradation in the specific fungal symbionts of P. oceanica roots. This sensitivity to artificial sounds revealed how sound can potentially affect the health status of P. oceanica. Moreover, these findings address the question of how much the increase of ocean noise pollution may contribute in the future to the depletion of seagrass populations and to biodiversity loss.

Possible Mechanisms for the Effects of Sound Vibration on Human Health

This paper presents a narrative review of research literature to “map the landscape” of the mechanisms of the effect of sound vibration on humans including the physiological, neurological, and biochemical. It begins by narrowing music to sound and sound to vibration. The focus is on low frequency sound (up to 250 Hz) including infrasound (1–16 Hz). Types of application are described and include whole body vibration, vibroacoustics, and focal applications of vibration. Literature on mechanisms of response to vibration is categorized into hemodynamic, neurological, and musculoskeletal. Basic mechanisms of hemodynamic effects including stimulation of endothelial cells and vibropercussion; of neurological effects including protein kinases activation, nerve stimulation with a specific look at vibratory analgesia, and oscillatory coherence; of musculoskeletal effects including muscle stretch reflex, bone cell progenitor fate, vibration effects on bone ossification and resorption, and anabolic effects on spine and intervertebral discs. In every category research on clinical applications are described. The conclusion points to the complexity of the field of vibrational medicine and calls for specific comparative research on type of vibration delivery, amount of body or surface being stimulated, effect of specific frequencies and intensities to specific mechanisms, and to greater interdisciplinary cooperation and focus.

Configurable Salat oriented device for assisting disability person

The inability to perceive clearly with the eyes can affect the blind and visually impaired in doing daily activities, especially in determining direction and navigation. In order to provide a non-invasive device, a qibla finder has developed to help them to determine the desired direction. This paper presents the development of a low-cost and easy-to-handle device to detect the Qibla direction for Salat, especially the visually impaired and deafened person. A magnetic sensor used as the main component to detect the correct angle of Qibla direction. Once detected, indicators (i.e. buzzer, vibrator and LEDs) will alert the user with continuous sound, vibration and lighting sequences.

Plant Health and Sound Vibration: Analyzing Implications of the Microbiome in Grape Wine Leaves

Understanding the plant microbiome is a key for plant health and controlling pathogens. Recent studies have shown that plants are responsive towards natural and synthetic sound vibration (SV) by perception and signal transduction, which resulted in resistance towards plant pathogens. However, whether or not native plant microbiomes respond to SV and the underlying mechanism thereof remains unknown. Within the present study we compared grapevine-associated microbiota that was perpetually exposed to classical music with a non-exposed control group from the same vineyard in Stellenbosch, South Africa. By analyzing the 16S rRNA gene and ITS fragment amplicon libraries we found differences between the core microbiome of SV-exposed leaves and the control group. For several of these different genera, e.g., Bacillus, Kocuria and Sphingomonas, a host-beneficial or pathogen-antagonistic effect has been well studied. Moreover, abundances of taxa identified as potential producers of volatile organic compounds that contribute to sensory characteristics of wines, e.g., Methylobacterium, Sphingomonas, Bacillus and Sporobolomyces roseus, were either increased or even unique within the core music-exposed phyllosphere population. Results show an as yet unexplored avenue for improved plant health and the terroir of wine, which are important for environmentally friendly horticulture and consumer appreciation. Although our findings explain one detail of the long-term positive experience to improve grapevine’s resilience by this unusual but innovative technique, more mechanistic studies are necessary to understand the whole interplay.

Dental Condition as A Factor Modifying the Transmission of the Sound Vibration in the Skull Bones

Dental deficiencies coexist with hearing loss, and dental treatment can improve hearing acuity. To prove that different dentition affects the transmission of acoustic vibrations through bone conduction, we prepared six dry human skulls to reconstruct teeth and soft tissues. We measured the transmission of vibrations from the maxilla to the cochlea, in the toothless jaw (TJ), jaw with lateral defects with frame dentures (FD), toothless jaw with complete dentures (CD), and jaw with reconstructed dentition (RD). Each skull was flexibly suspended. The maxilla was stimulated with the bone vibrator Radioear B71. The vibrations of the pyramid were measured perpendicularly using the Polytec PSV-400-M2 scanning vibrometer. Characteristics of frequencies differed simultaneously on the left (l) and right (r) side of each skull. In all states (from 234 Hz to 5 kHz), we identified 10–21 resonant (R) and 9–21 antiresonant (AR) frequencies unilaterally (+/− 5%). In about 30% of cases, they were each time inconsistent with the “physiological” state-RD. In the 500 Hz–2 kHz frequency range (necessary for understanding speech), the effective vibrations velocities vRMS (mm/s) near cochlea were significantly lower in RD than in tree states, where (depending on the dentures) the least energy reached cochlea in FD and the most in TJ.