Sound

We've seen chairs with built-in sound like the like Ace Bayou's Wireless Audio Recliner and the Gamepod chair, but a new product called the SubPac aims to offer similar functionality in a lightweight, portable design. Essentially, the SubPac is like a subwoofer designed to make a user feel what he or she is listening to, instead of just hearing it.  Read More

Having already given the tamest of family cars a hefty dose of testosterone – at least auditorily – Swedish company SoundRacer looks set to turn up the volume of electric vehicles – this time on the outside. Having garnered interest from several electric car and scooter manufacturers, the company decided to demonstrate its system at CeBIT by making some big noise with an RC car.  Read More

Great Ormond Street Hospital is a children’s hospital based in London, UK, which recently received an installation dubbed “Lullaby Factory,” courtesy of architectural firm Studio Weave. Spanning a total of ten stories in height, and 32 meters (105 feet) in length, Lullaby Factory enlivens a formerly dull space while producing gentle lullabies which can only be experienced from within the building.  Read More

The idea of catching a sound in a bottle in order to listen to it later is one that many of us have toyed with, especially as kids. Unfortunately it isn't possible in the real world, at least not with a real bottle and nothing but a real bottle. However, Re: Sound Bottle is more than what it first appears to be, and its internal components means this particular bottle is capable of recording, remixing, and playing back sounds captured from all manner of different sources.  Read More

Purveyor of geek-friendly toys and gadgets ThinkGeek is now offering the Theremin Mini Kit, a miniature assemble-it-yourself theremin which is marketed toward those looking to get started with the instrument.  Read More

Scientists often need to find creative ways to present data visually so others can interpret it more easily. Peter Larsen, of the Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S., decided to do something a little different: he represented microbial data with sounds. More specifically, he sonified data relating to bacteria collected from the western part of the English Channel.  Read More

Everyone knows that it’s possible to identify different species of birds by their vocalizations, but did you know that it’s also possible to differentiate between different types of bats based on their echolocation calls? Well, now you do. So far, however, there hasn’t been a standardized system of doing so – it’s been left up to individual human listeners to decide on the closest match. That may soon no longer be the case, though, as the new online iBatsID tool comes into use.  Read More

If you suspect that songs today tend to sound the same, it turns out you're right. A group of Spanish scientists looked at a huge database of songs and analyzed their trends, publishing their results in the scientific journal Nature. What they found was proof positive that, over the last few decades, songs have progressively gotten louder, decreased their pitch transitions, and generally become more homogeneous.  Read More

Sensory substitution devices work by converting one type of sensory input into another – examples would be systems such as CASBLiP and EYE 21, which allow the blind to “see” by assigning sounds to images. Now, a team of researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created a similar wearable device, known as EyeMusic. It “employs pleasant musical scales to convey visual information,” and could one day help the visually impaired more easily perform tasks that the rest of us take for granted.  Read More