View from the Solent (I can't find the blog - is it gone?) left a comment a few posts back with a link to this.
Yes, in the wake of Electrofag come the Electrojunkies! Some even report 'physiological effects' from listening to the new form of legal high - sounds.
The video is full of hysterical adults insisting that listening to sounds will make their kids rush out and buy heroin. None have, or they'd have reported it. Nobody is allowed to think that the teenagers in the video are putting on any kind of act to wind up the adults because we all know kids don't ever do that sort of thing. Sounds make them do it.
The adults want to put a stop to it. How? You can't test for residual sound metabolites. What will they do - test the kids' skulls for echoes? If you have a teenager and they are behaving oddly, that's because they are a teenager. If they are not behaving oddly then you'd better keep a close eye on them because that's abnormal. They are up to something.
You can produce physiological effects with sounds. The most obvious one being deafness from listening to Nazareth at full volume through headphones. Perhaps less widely known are the tricks you can play with subsonics, sounds below the range of hearing. A low frequency tone can make your eyes vibrate and you'll think you're seeing strange ghostly shapes in your peripheral vision. A high-volume tone at around 19 Hz will make most people's bowels spontaneously evacuate. Nobody can hear it so they won't know why they are suddenly sitting in something warm and damp. Must get a tone generator and wire it into the sound system at an ASH meeting.
High-pitched sounds are used to drive teenagers away because we oldies can't hear those sounds any more. Feel the pain, young 'uns.
These aren't dangerous. I doubt anyone could become addicted to shitting themselves and any who do are the sort who needed serious help anyway. There is no reason to suppose that listening to tones is a gateway to crystal meth. Even if some of those sites do link to drug-stuff sites, so what? If the kids wanted to find that stuff, they'd find it. If they don't want to find it they won't follow the link. There's no need anyway - most of that stuff is available behind the bike sheds.
There are far more dangerous sounds out there. Listening to Nick Clegg talking about the smoking ban is bad for your blood pressure and can make your head turn inside out. Listen to the Dreadful Arnott for too long and you'll experience an urge to burst your eardrums with cocktail sticks, as well as spontaneously catching scabies and head lice.
These sounds are a fad. No adult will admit to having tried them - and you just know they have - because to do so would mean they'd have to admit that they didn't get the urge to seek out Filthy John the drug dealer and give him the keys to their car in exchange for a little bag of Vim. The kids are having a hell of a laugh at the adults' expense here.
What's next? Looking at pictures of politicians can make you psychotic?
Oh, wait, that one's true.
8 comments:
Good Rock 'n' Roll certainly affects my neurological passageways.
Well I'm 57 and have been playing around with binaural beats on and off for years. They are very interesting. Yes you can get some wierd effects but they haven't sent me doolally yet.
Some frequencies are extremly good for meditation, or helping you drop off to sleep. In fact, I actually used a recording I had last night to help me have a relaxing sleep. I forgot I had them, but was browsing one of my backup drives and found them, so stuffed em on my i-pod and I was away with the fairies in no time.
So here's one adult who admits to trying them :) Amazing coincidence I should re-find them only last night, and here you are talking about them tonight!
LI,
I just have an ID, not a blog. There are far more capable people than me writing on the interwebs.
Please pop by and vote on the fuckwits 2010 blogging list We're all bored with Mr's Dale and his sycophants giving each other a round of applause every damned Year.
Heard about alpha waves many years ago but could never find any. Anyway, got this buzz about a free site to pick up some sounds so I got some. Ran my plague detector over them and they seemed fine. So then set to go.
Turned them on and the wife said there's a fishing boat outside. Besides that, nothing. Feel cheated. Reminds me of cooking banana skins in the oven in the 60s. Big let down.
Of topic LI, but coming to a site nr. you! We are witnesing the end of freedom of speech on the internet!
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716/
Disturbing!
Not that it matters, but why aren't frequencies below the range of hearing called infrasonics? To me 'subsonic' means a velocity below the speed of sound. I suppose following the pattern of 'infrared', it to be more like infralouisarmstrong, or perhaps infracastersemenya. Enough pointless smug pedantry.
(BTW I was really expecting to see a well-worded rant here on the BMA's suggestion of taking fat kids away from their parents)
maybe they are called infrasonics by those who know about such things. 'Subsonic' makes me think of an underwater hedgehog, for some reason.
JuliaM already has the Barking Mad Association's latest lunacy covered.
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