Re: Why is high high? (Eliot Handelman )

Subject: Re: Why is high high?
From:    Eliot Handelman  <eliot(at)GENERATION.NET>
Date:    Thu, 27 Aug 1998 22:23:14 -0500

James W. Beauchamp wrote:

> Can you imagine a situation where the high frequencies would be coming out
> of the floor and the base frequencies out of the ceiling? Wouldn't this
> seem strange? Wouldn't the reverse situation seem more natural?
>

It would sound like a field of crickets chirping under the looming roll of thunder. I
don't see that analogies with nature are helpful for this puzzle. One idea, however,
might be this: I once looked at the literature on body resonances, and whereas something
like 40-60 hz is supposed to resonate the viscera at sufficienly high intensities, tones
on the order of 200 hz or so set up cranial resonances. So that might be one way of
thinking about the issue.

-- eliot

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