evanmorris.com

Annals of the easily amused.

They’re harvesting the corn in the huge field across the road, which reminded me of this article:

Anyone with normal hearing can distinguish between the musical tones in a scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. We take this ability for granted, but among most mammals the feat is unparalleled.

This finding is one of many insights into the remarkable acuity of human hearing garnered by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, reported in January in the journal Nature.

Izhak Fried of U.C.L.A. and his colleagues worked with epileptic patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain to pinpoint the source of their seizures. Some of the probes linked to the auditory cortex, providing the researchers with a detailed window into sound processing.

The study revealed that groups of exquisitely sensitive neurons exist along the auditory nerve on its way from the ear to the auditory cortex. In these neurons natural sounds, such as the human voice, elicit a completely different and far more complex set of responses than do artificial noises such as pure tones. In this mixed environ­ment humans can easily detect frequencies as fine as one twelfth of an octave—a half step in musical terminology.

more: Why Dogs Don’t Enjoy Music: Scientific American.

I spend a fair amount of time sitting on the front porch on a wooden porch swing suspended from two chains, staring at that cornfield and swinging gently forward and back.  Hey, it beats watching Oprah.

So I was sitting there this afternoon as they harvested with these humongous harvesters that make a sort of mid-range hissing roar as they travel back and forth across the field.  The nearest harvester is perhaps a mile away.  And I’m drinking a cup of coffee and swinging back and forth.  And I notice, as I’m swinging, that the pitch of the harvesters is rising as I swing forward and falling as I swing back.  After a moment, I realized that I was picking up the Doppler shift of the sound caused by the movement of my ears toward and away from the machine (8 to 12 inches, max), even though that distance is minuscule in relation to my distance from the harvester.

Maybe you have to live in the middle of nowhere to find that neat, but I do.

Next up: How to tell chipmunks apart.

Last updated on Monday, October 27, 2008