Yesterday, I referred to the ‘colours’ of noise and mentioned the concept of the ‘brown note’; which, not to put too fine a point on it, is an infrasonic frequency between 5Hz and 9Hz that causes an involuntary loosening of the bowels. (Hence the name.)
Allegedly, this was used to great effect by Adolf Hitler at the Nazi Party Nuremberg Rallies in the 1930s, where an inaudible low frequency would be played over the public address speakers for a certain time before Hitler took to the stage, inducing discomfort and nausea in the audience, which would ‘miraculously’ disappear when the Führer appeared; due to the troubling low frequency being strategically removed from the speaker feed.
The brown note has been dismissed by some as an urban myth, but interestingly, the NASA space programme, worried about the harmful effects of rocket flight on astronauts, tested cockpit seats that transferred brown note vibration and other similar frequencies directly to test pilots. Very high power levels of 160dB were generated at frequencies between 0.5Hz and 40Hz, and test subjects suffered motor ataxia, nausea, visual disturbance, degraded task performance and difficulties in communication.
Maybe there’s a subconscious, but very real physiological reason why you’re uncomfortable when a car pulls up next to you at the traffic lights, emitting window-rattling bass frequencies…
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(My free eBook is designed to reassure rather than alarm you; but it does make ideal reading for ‘the smallest room’.)
