Today, you are a member of… Tinnitis
The tip-top of the New Year is always a little vertigo-inducing, members. Our heads, after all, are just big acoustical systems, capable of limitless variations in frequencies and pitch. You may feel echoes of 2006 bouncing off the vast unknown of 2007, creating strange harmonics and oscillations. The trick is not to let the resonances (or dissonances) get you down. Think of overtone singers who manipulate their mouth, larynx and pharynx to effect low hums and high melodies simultaneously. Or opera singers who nail the exact place in the sound spectrum which is absent from human speech or orchestra grandeur so that their song is heard above all. Or sonar operators who intentionally generate pulses to get a sense of place. They know that acoustics ain’t nothing but the art of physics applied to the beauty of sound, members. So if you got some ringing in the noggin this week think of it as an atonal (or tonal) sound check for the New Year and the science that lies therein.