See the whole Newsonic Story at: http://cosmicastronomy.com/newsonic.htm LET ME GUESS..... SNOWFLAKES ARE MADE BY SOUND ! ------------------------------------------------------------- Sound experperiment descriptions begin further below under the topic "THE SOUND EXPERIMENT" ------------------------------------------------------------- UNIVERSAL SNOWFLAKES ------------------------------------------------------------- Research undertaken by myself in Ottawa between 1981 and 1982 revealed that snowflakes, despite their seeming uniqueness per flake, were in fact all characteristically identical according to a fundamental geometrical understructure that lay well beyond the realm of their obvious six sided shapes. These snowflake results can be viewed at the following URLs. Bear in mind the originals went through three catastrophic downturns in economic health and along with the wealth away went drawings and other infos related to the experiments, however a few master drawings and perifera survived the repeated unexpected catastrophies, more than enough to establish the above snowflake claims, you can see for yourself at these next URL's. http://www.cosmicastronomy.com/master.htm http://www.cosmicastronomy.com/master1.htm http://www.cosmicastronomy.com/matrix.htm http://www.cosmicastronomy.com/snowflak.htm Snowflake symmetry fundamental understructures are important because the same turns up in research experiments reported throughout sonic test experiments reported in pages Sound1.txt to Sound 6.txt. (Sound1.txt is what you are reading now). The geometrical understructure could be seen to be always the same in the snowflake images investigated, and was also seen to be identically the same in investigations of ionnic diffraction patterns as gained by electrons fired through crystals. A report on these confirmations is found at: http://www.cosmicastronomy.com/3d-learn.htm#electrons These investigations were done at the most prosaic yet exacting level. Specifically, snowflake photos and ionnic diffraction photos were re-photographed as 35mm slides which were projected on a wall with a Kodac slide projector. The aforesaid geometric understructure was drawn with meticulous care on a large sheet of paper. This sheet with the line drawing of geometry on it was simply taped against the wall, with the Kodac slides projected onto the pattern with the projector moved back and forth to focus each of several different projected images to the same radius as the large drawing. When adjusted to a common radius (by the simple expediency of moving the Kodac slide projector on a small coaster table back and forth and re-adjusting), lo and behold, miraculously, the snowflake and ionnic diffraction pattern images each came into a focus revealing a common detailed symmetry that was in all ways perfect, for each image, as their fundamental understructures. Yes, FOCUSED is a good word. It means that at a certain point in the focusing, the key fractal points of the snowflakes, and the seeming circularly arrayed points constituting the ionnic diffraction patterns studied via photo slides, suddenly uniformly fell into place along straight lines within the six sided geometrical matrix of the understructure image that was manifesting in the drawing. The seeming random independence of concentric circularities of the IONNIC images were replaced by an entirely different insight, of rigorous lineal straight line six sided arrays, set at concentric hexagonal images rotated at 90 degrees back and forth through succeeding larger radii in the geometrical understructure, with also canted 30 and 60 degree angles also predominant. Bear in mind that this geometry was NOT ad hoc (drawn by hand whimsically). It began with a radius scaled to 1 (unity) with six lines radiating out from a point of center sprayed apart in 60 degree angles. The rest of the construction was done with a pencil, compass, and straight edge. No mathematics were needed to construct the original image. It was strictly just a mechanical job putting it together by drawing it. As each slide was projected onto the wall (ergo the large paper sheet), lines were drawn in capturing the dominant symmetry axis and radials of each image including several snowflakes, and ionnic diffraction patterns. Thus, the interdependence of two seeming separate domains in physics; snowflakes (macro), and ionnic diffraction patterns (atomic lattices); was established. UNIVERSAL SOUND 1 ------------------------------------------------------------- Now, a third domain has been added to the same picture by recent private research. This third domain is the propigation of sound. Even though it is impossible to project sound waves onto a wall over the top of the aforesaid geometric understructure drawing, it has been possible to create snowflake-like images on a large table in front of a pair of speakers from a getto blaster sound system. And by careful FOCUSING of the objects used to comprise six sided hexagon and star images on the table, it has happened that two tiny 5 inch paper cone drivers of two speakers are now able to produce loudly and clearly the deepest bangs of tympanies and bass fiddles in tape recordings of symphonic music, plus the powerful hard driving sounds of bass drums and electric bass typically used by modern rock bands. This is true. It is particularly true in that the getto blaster (being cheap not expensive) was incapable of producing anything but aweful sounding noise on its own bereft of bass and high end. The point is that the above experiments (with snowflakes and ionnic diffraction patterns circ. 1981-82), and sound wave propigation (circ. summer/fall 1991), are easily described and reproduceable in that neither experiments involves technical knowledge or facilities, nor even for that matter any scholarly scientific expertise in either subjects. And in fact were conducted in the living rooms of a total of three small dwellings. In particular, the sound tests were initiated in the dining room area of a low rental condo on the West side of Ottawa, for virtually no cost except for a $365.00 cost of the getto blaster itself. The only investment was time and an unrelenting interest in pursuing the non obvious, until a definative understanding of the understructural 'snowflake' imagery was obvious. In the case of the sound experiments, tests took place daily for one and a half months until a six sided imagery in the placement of focuser objects on tables was self evident. Then another month and a half passed until it was proven beyond doubt that such imagery could enhance the production of low frequency, mid range, and high frequency sounds simultaneously at soft to loud volumes, at reasonable fidelity, proving that the sound propigation fractal geometry principle was not in part co-incidental but universal to the sound stream itself, independent of the sound system (speakers) used to reproduce it. It now seems that a primary principle in the propigation of sound has been identified, which is brand new, since it seems to be quite separate from secondary vibrations such as vibration of the table itself upon which the speakers sit. The brand new discovered ingredient is that sound propigates in six sided matrix and fractal patterns, longtitudinal waves per se are not the answer at all to the propigation of structured sounds such as of music, and voice. In the secondary case, the vibration occurs after the sound has propigated to where it then influences the end media (ie. the table) in a resulting way, where the secondary resonances are not the same as the primary resonances, which are moving through the air as sound before striking the table, to produce the secondary effect. Nowhere as complicated as it sounds, ahem, the reasons for the above remarks are spelled out in detail in the sequence of 6 'sound.txt' files. Identifying the snowflake-like geometrical fractal nature of the primary effect in the propigation of sound is discussed at length further below under the title: 'THE SOUND EXPERIMENT'. UNIVERSAL SOUND 2 ------------------------------------------------------------- See 'Newsonic Photo Story' at: Re: 1981 snowflake and ionnic diffraction pattern experiments: The earlier experiments involving snowflake photos (and photos of ionnic diffraction patterns) took place at a different pace, over a six month period with several difficulties encountered in finding a suitable way to match up the snowflake images with some kind of portable overlay until the use of slides solved the problem. A second difficulty that had to be over- come by trial and error was in determining the matrix of the six sided understructure. When this was accomplished the slide projector project was immediately put away in the hope of pursuing such studies further when opportunity was again present. The slide projector and associated gear were later sold for petty cash and groceries. Nothing further was done with these earlier experiments or their results in that the equipment used was shortly there- after sold for grocery money and the slides and drawings stored away until some future time when the experiment could be resumed or shared with others. An original percieved limitation as to how to circulate such detailed information at no cost can now be easily circumvented by merely describing the fundamental geometrical understructure (as outlined in the large drawings, now specified in SOUND6.TXT) in terms of lengths of radii and degrees of rotation to the key parts of the image, and citing the reference book used as sources for obtaining the useful images of snowflakes and the ionnic diffraction patterns used for that investigation. Specifically, the reference source is a coffee table book titled 'The Invisible Made Visible', by Ernst von Khuon, published by the New York Graphics Society Ltd., Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1968. The images for the ionnic diffraction patterns (electrical optical diffraction pattern via modified electron microscope) are on pages 232 to 234. There was no opportunity to use other atomic lattice images on pages 186 and 187. The snowflake images are on pages 124 and 125. Detailed data for the construction of the fundamental geometrical understructure of these images is in a table (SOUND6.TXT TABLE 1) at the end of this writing. PRINCIPLE FACTS ------------------------------------------------------------- Lets deal with the propigation of sound experiment, since it is the more recent and more complex. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ottawa, ontario October 13, 1991 ------------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================== THE SOUND EXPERIMENT ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ by: Greydon Moore. -------------------------------------------------------------------- USING HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLES TO ENHANCE THE SOUND OF AN ORDINARY GETTO BLASTER SPEAKER SYSTEM. IMPROVEMENT IN THE SOUND OF CHEAP SPEAKERS DEMONSTRATES THAT SOUND PROPIGATION IS BOTH HOLOPHONIC (PROPIGATES VIA INTERLINKED LINEALLY POLARIZED PATTERNING, AND HOLGRAPHIC (THE PATTERNING IS BASICALLY ARRAYED SIX-SIDED HEXAGRAMS AND STARS OF DAVID LOOSELY INTERCONNECTED IN LINKAGES OF STRAIGHT LINES, FORMING A MATRIX WHICH IS FUNDAMENTALLY LINEAL RATHER THAN CURVED IN PRINCIPLE, VERTICALLY STACKED ALSO IN RECURRANCY PATTERNS. IT FURTHER DEMONSTRATES THAT THE STANDARD MODEL OF THE PROPIGATION OF SOUND BY SPREADING OF CONCENTRIC RINGS IS A USELESSLY FALSE PERCEPTION. -------------------------------------------------------------------- How do sound waves propigate? Via concentric rings spreading out, apparently. This is well known since all text books and science magazines show the simulation of the propigation of sound waves as a series of concentric rings spreading out from a generating source, such as a daubber or two duabbers bobbing up and down tapping, in a tub of water. This you learn emphatically in high school physics. In a second obvious nature, concentric rings from two or more sources interconnect as they pass by each other, to form visible (and invisible in the case of true sound) points of cancellation and re-inforcement, similar to the simulation of sound gained by looking at waves wafting up and down and mixing on an oceon, and thinking of this undulation as a semi 3-D embodiment of a so-said principle of the propigation of sound. What these simulations CANNOT show is full 3-D holographic spread of sound from around a sound source in all directions, albeit the simulations can be shown to be focused so that major volume (or fidelity in the case of loudspeakers) is preferred along a main axis such as straight out in front of a loudspeaker. Born in mind also is awareness that daubbers are hard physical devices which repeatedly poke circular little holes in the water as they bob. This is fundamentally different than occilations propigating forth from a sound source such as a loud speaker. The pre-concieved belief (in the simulation of two-dimensional concentric rings as being a correct portrayal of the reality of sound), is most seriously wrong. Bascially, six sided, specifically fundamentally 12 sided stars, as a geometrically faceted polarization matrix, is closer to the truth and this can be demonstrated by a simple 'EXPERIMENT' using common inexpensive objects which can be purchased in a local hobby or craft store over by the beads rack. The principle can be proven by anyone, at practically no cost, and only some slight moderation in subtle listening ability is needed. Plus a willingness to believe that moving an object only 1/4 cm or less can effect both bottom bass and high frequency sound ranges simultaneously. Plus an interest in trying an experiment that WORKS! DO IT YOURSELF SPEAKER ENHANCEMENT ------------------------------------------- Picture a snowflake of desert plate size floating in front of a loud speaker. Rather than solid ice, picture the flake as points of light, with parts interconnected by thin straight lines both radiating out from a centerpoint and connecting the rims of the snowflake's shape in hexagrams of various sizes and rotations. Picture the room full of such flakes floating both horizontally and vertically and phased to each other at 7 1/2, 15, 30, and 60 degree angles. Sub-frequencies in the harmonics probably resonnate all the way down to the atomic lattice levels in the air molecules and objects in the room. But this is only a speculation. The slightest movement of you in the room will change the way the snowflake's array and even the size of the flakes. Nonetheless the whole thing remains harmonious despite the shifts. Except for the distortion caused by irrationally shaped objects, for instance you standing directly in front of a speaker muffling its fidelity. Imagine being able to reach out and arbitrarily re-adjust the position of some of the floating snowflakes, even to adjusting their sizes slightly, and suddenly the muffle is gone again. Now extrapolate to a single plane, with the snowflakes arrayed on a tabletop in front of a pair of speaker boxes. This is in fact physically possible and is what will be described next. THE EXPERIMENT ------------------------------------------- A cheap getto blaster ($300 to $400 price range) can be made to sound like a high performance system, including deep and powerful bass, and clear strong high end cymbols. Nothing of its electronics is touched nor its speaker enclosures modified. The only modification is to the environment surrounding the speakers. I used small plastic bead-like objects of 3mm size named 'dazzlers' supplied by hobby and craft stores in the Ottawa area for the modif- ication. I call the 'dazzlers' beads in the following description. I also used larger six sided ornamental beads (which look a bit like snowflakes) of 12mm and 18mm size and sold in the craft stores as 'cartwheels'. The beads were used singularly by themselves, plus in composite constructions which I effectionately call pineapples and hats. The pineapples consist of a 12mm cartwheel topped by an 18mm cartwheel topped by a 12mm cartwheel (with a few of these topped by beads). The second composite object (called hats) consist of a 12mm cartwheel topped by a bead. These objects were used to pin down the location of six sided images on a tabletop upon where the getto blaster was sitting, and to rapidly expand six-sided images to twelve sided figures and stars using beads when I felt like doing it. For these rosette-like figures, the pineapples with a dazzler on top were sometimes able to produce a more exacting fidelity but mainly they are without the bead on top. Otherwise there are not that many pineapples in the initial array on the tabletop of constructed images comprising the 'experiment'. Most of the constructions consist of the hats laid out in six-sided figures which I call rosettes, with occasional hats sitting between major figures. Three of the major figures consist of only beads, with a hat sitting at the center point in those images. Two of these major figures are Stars of David with beads outlining a central cube image (hexagram) with two or three beads outlining each side arm of the star, plus beads placed at points conducive to twelve sided geometry. A sample of this geometry can be seen in the following images: http://cosmicastronomy.com/photo1.htm Bear in mind that the photos in 'photo1.htm' were taken with the cheapest plastic 110mm camera money could buy, and were developed in photo labs whose technicians had hardly more training than how to turn the developing machines on and off. What I got back repeatedly, despite different photo services tried, were pictures that were vary dark, and very blue/green tinged, and often blurry. The images in 'photo1.htm' were ones I was able to enhance in a Dos PC graphics editor sufficiently to be at least useable - oh how I wish they were better and regret their poor quality. The composite objects in certain places produce much greater gain in sound fidelity, although they are more tasking to place properly, not only having to sit on one of the proper sound nodals on the table but also along a radial axis of a six sided cubic image so as to be aligned along a seeming main axis of the fundamental sound stream, and sometimes along an alternative twelve sided axis. It turns out that some composite objects DO produce definately greater fidelity when focused JUST right. And finally, to get it JUST right, six-sided cubic images were drawn on graph paper using an ordinary compass, pencil, and straight edge, and the beads and composite objects were placed on the key nodal points of these taped down drawings. An inherent difficulty in the experiment is that the beads and composite objects move in the sound stream, particularly where loud bass is active in loud volume tests. On occasion a bead would literally hop through the air. In other words, the experiment as it sits on a long table in my little dining area (original tests cir. 1989) is unstable, and even a heavy footfall on the floor can cause beads to bounce out of focus. Nevertheless it does not take much effort to refocus the images hence sound into place, by carefully moving the objects by small iotas on the table. Small iotas means just that. It turns out that a tiny bead (3mm in size) can cause a whole lower octave in the bass range to completely disappear if out of focus by a distance approximating its own radius of 3mm, or less. Similarly for the high end. Merely by rotating a bead (because it is faceted and not smoothly round) on the spot can enhance or diminish finer sounds available in the high end of the sound stream in this experiment. The reason why the beads can so definatively effect the sound is that each has been filed by hand into a six sided shape around its circumpherence. The 'dazzlers' (beads) come similar in shape to a revolving restaurant on top of a space needle, and it has become apparent (at least in this experiment) that objects which are round in any way do not work well because they produce subtle distortions throughout the sound range. Whereas, after a bead has been filed to have six sides, it can cause the sound to clarify or amplify, or both, when put in a place formerly occupied by a round bead. Similarly for the cartwheels. It was found that by filing their leaves (using ordinary household small hobby files) into as close to a six sided finite as possible, that conciderable overall fidelity is gained above gains made via the original unfiled cartwheels. Unfortunately the cartwheels can only be filed so that just three of six hexagon sides can occur, since the hand held file cannot get into the area where the six leaves conjunct with the centerhole area of these objects. Nevertheless, all cartwheels of both 12mm and 18mm size used in this experiment have been hand filed. As have all beads. At the moment of this writing there are 381 objects in use in this experiment. 237 beads are in use. There are 114 hats, and 20 pineapples. HISTORY ------------------------------- 9 years ago, (circ. 1982), the idea of hologramic sound, or sound tests conducted along the lines of searching for or working with holographic principles were laughed at in that anyone from hobbyist to serious loudspeaker designer was looking for more improved flat curve responses and even more high tech engineering in things like crossover networks, equalizing circuits, and chokes, etc. Tuning a speaker to room resonances was concidered the thinking of a sadly badly mistaken imagination. So much so that any conversations about this were regarded as a nuisance at best, and totally out of synch with the best of times at worst. The word 'twaddle' in fact was used by an internationally renouned audio scientist when told of open port speaker enhancement experiments, in which crossover networks and qualizing circuits were not used, in loudspeaker designs that were under experimentation circ. early 1980's in Ottawa. Nowadays however 'holographic' or 'hologramic' are THE buzz words in the audio industry as all manufactors seek to offer more and more elaborately named and weirder looking small or large devices that claim to function to produce 'quote' holographic sound. Especially when personally tuned by an audio specialist in the room to where such speakers are delivered from the store. This is part of the $30,000 price some such speakers can demand. This may be true. What is most true is that 'quote' holographic sound cannot be truely reproduced unless the PRINCIPLES of holographic sound are understood. As long as concentric rings, and waves on the ocean theories of sound propigation are still in vogue, it is impossible for thinkers to have an idea of what holographic sound is really like, for they have no way of testing any 'holographic' ideas with predictable results until they know WHAT to test. Ergo, back to the above described 'EXPERIMENT'. Specifically, once the nature of six and twelve sided (cubic) sound imaging becomes apparent, it is only a question of dropping objects into invisible nodal points comprising unseen images on a tabletop upon which sits a cheap getto blaster to hear instant improvement in sound range, volume, and fidelity, with greater gain with each additional object added in, continuing as more objects and object combos are set into place. To a point. It is easy to overdo in such an experiment. So listening is the final answer as to where and how many objects come to be used. The key insight is that it's PREDICTABLE. Once you get any central node point identified, the rest of a six sided or twelve sided array follows in due course, with more fidelity, volume, and range unfolding inexorably as each next object is set in place to fill out the big holographic image which already exists in the unseen of the sound stream. At this point, the controlling of raw meat sound produced by a getto blaster becomes merely a question of doing the work to fill in more of the 'hologramic' geometry imagery with more and more of objects placed in the self evident but invisible nodes around the table top to hear the raw meat sound disappear to be replaced by fidelity, due to the distruption and redistribution of otherwise discordant propigations which come from sound being projected into a new environment which is totally different in physical artifactii than the environment in which the sound was originally recorded. A nodal itself is easily found. Simply turn on a stereo set, and, listening very carefully, slowly move a finger around on the floor (or table) out in front of either speaker. You will hear the sound go up or down, subtely or sometimes with great notice depending on the speaker and the place of your finger. Where gain occurs, this is a positive nodal (which can be called 'hot spots'). The same is true with the finger in the area between the speakers. In fact hot spots (more subtle) can be found throughout a room, using a finger. The term hot spot is misleading if it turns out that such spots are actually points of negative cancellation which are dissolved when the finger interjects, giving the illusion of a positive re-enforcement. This idea is correct if it is believed that cancelling the spot at one point in the room simultaneously cancels similar spots recurring in a moire-like grid which saturates the room. It may be in fact that other positive seeming nodals are the points of stars of David and not necessarily the center point of a six sided figure. In which case these may in fact further re-enforce in a positive way simultaneously throughout the room when the finger is interjected. In the experiments herein being described, certain objects are found to have the best effect for interjection into the hot spots. Six sided nuts of many kinds and sizes were originally tried. Yet all they ended up doing was producing a noticable effect yes, but spitting distortion and selective muddying just kept spreading willy nilly up and down in the sound range and there was no usable gain or improvement in the high end. In conclusion, it was not possible to gain any sense of what was truely happening in the sound stream until snowflake-like cartwheel objects started to be used, with great care taken to place them and focus them to exquisite precision at known hot spots around the table. In later stages, beads were introduced, and finally all beads and cartwheels were filed as much as humanly possible with big fingers holding small objects into cubic (six sided) so that the edges were lineal and straight rather than circular. The experiment herein being described had gone on for over a month and a half before cartwheel objects were tried. In fact at one point over 120 arbitrary objects were sitting around the table and even on the speakers, including nail brushes taped to the front of the speakers, and nuts stacked on nuts tucked into corners around the speakers, not to mention six sided nuts sitting at the front edge of the table ready to drop off. The one thing that was easily noticed was that six sided nuts were better than round nuts, or better than nuts which had both roundness and a hexagonal shape. The nuts were of many sizes and included wheel nuts from cars and trucks. Since these (lug nuts) had both roundness and a hexagonal shape, none were actually used in the experiment other than to be tried and discarded. A few nuts were from the plumbing trade with large hexagram shapes and large center holes into which were placed smaller nuts, trying every idea with no assured definative principles unfolding. HOMING IN ON A POINT OF PRINCIPLE --------------------------------------------- In fact, at first in earlier stages of the experiment before trying hexagonally laid out cartwheels, (since nothing yet had been learned which was truely predictable) in exasperation handfuls of tiny beads and cartwheels were scattered in great number around the table, and with volume cranked up well into the raw meat distortion range, all areas on the underside of the table were lightly tapped with a knife handle and lo and behold the little objects began to dance and vibrate into places which produced an immediate improvement (albiet still in no way fidelic) in the overall sound. It turned out that this simple technique produced a sufficient stablizing in the overall sound range that it was now possible to start toying with more subtle tuning techniques. First, all of the nuts were soon removed from the table's surface. And at many positions, a nut was replaced with a cartwheel object. This served to quickly gain a sense of just how far such a makeshift display could be tweaked and fiddled to produce more good stuff in some otherwise very bad sound. During this period the scattering of random small objects were gradually removed piece by piece leaving select grouping in certain regions of the table. The groupings were really nothing more than a clumping of objects but it was very apparent that something was being enhanced by the groupings. For instance it was soon found that a dull rumbling in the deep bass range could be resolved into grunting bass fiddles with bows being drawn across the strings. And a solid harsh very high ringing effect in the higher end could be resolved into a pop orchestra's cymbols with human female voices singing in the background. The worst problem all along was screetching violins. Very irritating to the ears. Not to mention the turbo roar - this was inherent getto blaster distortion so bad that it could literally drive the speaker boxes up to 1/2 a foot forward across the table as the speakers or a speaker roared instead of vibrated to bass sounds, ruining hours of work in seconds flat, as would occur with certain tape cassettes. In these earlier days, the smell of speaker smoke definately wafted around the work area, occasionally. Now, with the cartwheel groupings, both of these major undesirable side effects (screetch and roar) seemed to be coming under control. However, the overall results were becoming somewhat see-saw, in that focusing improvements in the high end could result in loss of deep bass, and visa versa. As well, many areas in the overall sound range could still sound like raw racket or shrilly regardless of how things were placed or subtely re-positioned here and there around the table. At this point there was not yet any concept of an understructural geometrical principle in the placing of objects on the tabletop. No fundamental geometric matrix could be seen sitting before the eyes, in other words. To make a long story short, better sound performance did get tuned via the aforesaid tapping with a knife handle on the underside of the table, so that individual voices could be discerned in pop orchestra music of the kind produced for elevator and supermarket background music, much of which turns out to be quite enjoyable once the orchestra techniques can be plainly heard. At this point it had been proven that higher frequency sound was implanted in the sound stream from the tape and getto blaster's electronics, even though the getto blaster's tweeters were patently incapable of audibly reproducing such high frequency on their own. FINDING THE PRINCIPLE ------------------------------------------- In one of the hot areas on the table (a so-called 'hot spot'), several cartwheel objects (which had been placed one by one on a try and see basis) were suddenly seen to be forming the unfinished outline of a six sided figure, with one of the cartwheels sitting at the hottest spot, at the center of the image. It was merely a question of placing a few more cartwheels into place to complete the six sided image, and so to hear a handsome immediate gain in the overall performance of the sound stream as each next piece was added to finish the six sided hexagram. Over on the other side of the table a second image was created, this time bead by bead rather than with cartwheels. As each bead was put in place, some subtle area in the sound was heard to improve. That was the moment of the telepathic strike, when the overiding holographic concept suddenly became clear as a bell. There was a patterning to all this, an understructure! POSITIONING THE SPEAKERS ---------------------------------------------------- The room (where the experiment took place) is in the dining area of a small two story 3 bedroom condo, (once delux now allowed to run down by the real estate owners) with the getto blaster sitting against the dining area wall on a six foot long table. The getto blaster speakers were first moved around on the table top at about five feet apart to find places slightly out from the wall for the best overall sound according to the room. This is not unusual at all. The placing of speakers is commonly a critical factor for the way loudspeakers sound in a room. STABALIZING THE SOUND STREAM ---------------------------------------------------- Stabalizing the sound stream was not as easy as you might think. In the first place it was necessary to produce a stronger overall bass range sound that was stable enough that it did not cause the speaker cabinetes to turbo forward across the table in a roar of raw meat sound, or to perform loud volume engery distortions sufficient to blow the simple 5 inch paper cone drivers. Sometimes there was the smell of voice coil smoke. Rattling, constant, sometimes for hours at a time, was the biggest problem that had to be resolved. There was no care at all taken to protect or baby the speakers and for two weeks it was thought that perhaps the left hand speaker had been blown. (It wasn't). But for two weeks it rattled constantly with any tape which had a loud bass on it, at times irregardless of high or low volume. An eventual bass stablizing was done using a simple technique. This was to incorporate three ordinary eight sided crystal water glasses. One of these turned out to be well placed (had a suitable effect) in the middle of the table about 35 cms (about 13 and a half inches) out in front of the left hand speaker box. The other two glasses turned up suitably placed, tucked close together between the left hand speaker cabinate and the getto blaster's hardware part (the main console with the widgits and controls). The three glasses were partially filled with water using a roast baster to add and subtract water to get a suitable resonance in each glass. Then in each was placed one round plastic bead of 8mm size and faceted with eight sides and a thread hole up the middle. One such bead was floated in each glass to break up the hard surface of the water. By carefully moving and turning the glasses around, noticable hot spots and orientations were found that brought in a stronger bass, such that it was possible via subtle final adjustments of the positions of all three glasses to bring in an augmentation of a bigger bottom bass sound compared to the nonexistence noise initially produced by the getto blaster speakers, particularly at extra loud volume. Mind you, the bass was somewhat thumpy and distorted, but it was there. This was not just a subtle change in a barely audible range but a major change, in which the getto blaster speakers could reproduce audible droning tympanies and deep grunting bass fiddles of a symphony orchestra. Albiet the sound was raw lacking advanced tone, and some of it was faint. But final tuning later, via six-twelve sided rosette images, resolved the tone of the bass completely into such clearity that individual bass producing instruments could be clearly discerned when playing the music of a symphany orchestra. The eight sided water glasses were eventually pulled away and discarded. Having done their job it was now plain they were adding a subtle unpleasant distortion of their own. It was also eventually learned that images of a five sided nature, or eight sided, do not cut it. A five sided image was tried and right away it was noticed that sound dramatically appeared and disappeared openly in peaks and valleys simply by moving slowly back and forth in front of the speakers. And eight sided objects produced a subtle fracturing of sounds no matter how they are placed, at least in the tests of this experiment. The result is that only objects filed to six sided straight edge symmetry are now in place on the table, and only six sided and twelve sided figures and also Stars of David are in use as images. These are called the rosettes in this description. There are also several straight lines made of beads which have helped to stablize the sound and in one embodiment forms a boundry around a certain hexagram. There is one cross made of beads with two lines fixed at right angles. However this may be at the center of a large hexagram whose six sided circumpherence has not yet been identified. THE BAD TAPE EFFECT ---------------------------------------------------- Another noticable effect with everything in place, is that even really bad tapes, recorded with much distortion and harsh conditions, or cranked out in a pirate factory, can be made to sound quite fidelic and in fact some of them superb. For instance what seemed like a badly distorted electric bass in a James Bond theme song turned out to a loud electric bass played with fuzz tone. In other words the above described hologramic imaging is capable of straightening out bad sound, with apparently only the generation of some sound itself needed to produce raw material to be fidelicized (re-enhanced) by refocusing through the holographic interfaces via principle of 6 and 12 sided and Star of David matixing in hologramic invisible images made 'visible' via solid objects. With rosettes, sour notes (inter frequency bad harmonics between instruments and notes as being produced by for instance getto blaster speakers or by badly placed cartwheel objects, can be tuned right out. Period. No more sour sounds in the music. NOTICABLE SURPRISES AND CONSEQUENCES ---------------------------------------------------- The getto blaster used was a Model 8400 by Fisher. This model has a CD player as well as two cassette tape drives, and AM-FM radio. From the onset it was obvious that the CD player was only marginal. In particular, old tapes from the swing era days which has been digitally enhanced to go on CD disks had rumbling bass instruments without discernment. If you could modify the bass at all by placing any objects crudely around the table and tried the CD player, the most you could get of this swing era bass was comparable to someone in Indonesia banging on a hand held big skin drum whose skin was soggy in moist weather, that is, if the bass sound itself didn't simply dissolve into a meaningless rattle. You get the picture of this CD. The bass sound was disgusting, and the higher frequency stuff was just as bad; pretty well a constant high shrill with a white noise standing ring in it which pierced the ears even at low volume. The standing shrill was so bad that for awhile every object in the room which had a large open top was partially covered with paper which muted the shrill somewhat but didn't get rid of it. After tuning the system with a few hologramic rosettes, the CD player's sound was purer with obvious clear tones throughout the whole sound range top to bottom, even on the old Benny Goodman wire tape recordings digitally enhanced for the CD disk. This is the way things are now. In point of fact high pitched hiss and pissing sounds have become in fact triangles, bells, high hat cymbols, tamborines, human voices, etc., on all music played by cassette tape, FM radio, or CD player through this getto blaster. In fact, the so called electronic hiss can be made to more or less completely vanish. What can happen now is a significant overall improvement in fidelity with a slight echo effect, but no more so-called 'electronic hiss' with the Dynamic Bass Expander (DBE) button either IN or OUT. (It has been noticed that hiss can be less with the DBE button On in general). In other words, now the system is re-enhancing an original sound hologram, and is doing it irregardless of the bottom line of the electronic or driver system being used to RECORD or REPRODUCE that original sound. At least so it seems. It is obvious that some sound coloration is being imparted by the objects themselves used to construct the rosette and holographic images, but let's assume that coloration imparted by the speakers and cabinate design has in fact been greatly diminished if not in fact dissolved. This consequentially means that now, even at low volume, there is a full range of sound between bottom and top, unlike the original getto blaster, (before the experiment) in which virtually all of anything to hear simply vanished below a frequency range, and also below a certain low volume. And most all of audible sound was compressed into a mish mash product in a wall of sound for the getto blaster effect rather than any pretext at fidelity. INHERENT SOUND STREAM INSTABILITY IN FIVE SIDED FIGURES RULES OUT PENROSE MATHEMATICS ? ------------------------------------------------------------- Five sided figures seem to be inherently unstable. A rosette was made based on five sided geometry. An immediately noticable effect was that the sound stream became far more sensitive to overall motion in the room. For instance by merely walking back and forth past the front of the table, sound could be clearly heard to fade and return in abrupt peaks and valleys. Also, with the crude outline of a pentagon there on the table, the placing of tiny objects could result in a whole segment of the sound to abruptly disappear entirely, to abruptly return with the re-placing of the object by distances no more than an 8th of an inch, or the mere motion of the hand or shift of my body. These most noticable effects vanished when the five sided rosette was re-adjusted into a six sided shape. This little experiment (using a five sided figure) more or less puts to rest the idea that the hologram sound image is basically of Penrose formation rather than entirely cubic (six sided cubes and spheres) and fractal. This little test is of course not definative regards Penrose mathematics in sound generation and propigation nonetheless it was definative enough for me not to pursue the matter further. - Further work several years later and detailed in SOUND5.TXT, re-introduced five sided figures into the soundstream and confirmed that Penrose geometry is in effect, specifically, at very long distances from the sound source. However, at the initial stages as in this file you are reading, Penrose geometry tests were put aside and abandoned. INHERENT SOUND STREAM INSTABILITY IN FOUR SIDED FIGURES ? ------------------------------------------------------------- A four sided figure was created with interesting results. It seems that it interferred with the polarity of the sound waves returning from around * * * * * the room, and rather than accoustic re-enforcement, * * * there was a noticable, abrupt snuffing of the whole * * * * * sound stream, the sound was tightened up into a hard * * * weak electronic effect. As soon as the four sided * * * * * figure was straightened around into a six sided embodiment, booming harmonics and rich subsonics returned and hard shrill shrieks disappeared. Hence was born the idea of sound POLARIZATION, in that it seemed the four sided figure caused sound waves to deflect at off-angles and to cancel in a major way, rather than re-inforce. (Later was learned that straight lines and right angles could be successfully formed around and within a rosette with positive rather than diminished effect, which stands to reason since twelve sided geometry entails 90 degree angles in its constructions). The idea of Polarization in sound now helps to explain more about the above mentioned strange pothole effect gained by the five sided rosette. In that experiment, fixing a hole in one part of the sound range by inserting or removing an object from some place on the table resulted in another hole appearing in the sound stream. For instance a trumpet would disappear and cellos appear, and visa versa. And as already said, walking past the table produced significant peaks and valleys in the volume of sound as I walked past the speakers. Both of these undesirable effects vanished when I remade the five sided figure into a six sided rosette. And so the idea of a polarizing effect again makes sense, that the five sided figure was sending parts of the characteristics in the sound waves into an off-angle chaos, cancelling specific frequencies in the overall sound stream. MOMENTARY FOOTNOTE ------------------------------------------------------------- At this point (November 11, 1991), there are thirteen rosettes on the table. One of these out in front of the left hand speaker box consists of two large triangles back to back. One of these triangles is equalateral and sits toward the front end of the table. Behind this (nearer the speaker box) is the second, consisting of two 30 degree angles and a 120 degree angle. Their base is 52 cms and passes east to west phase-shifted roughly 7 1/2 degrees from being horizontally perpendicular to the left hand speaker. There does not seem to be a standard size or even a standard basic design for the 13 images, other than, like snowflakes, each rosette is fundamentally six sided, or relates to six sided geometry. Only five are six sided embodiments only. The others, like snowflakes, are fundamentally twelve sided in design. It is probable that the designs on my table are peculiar to my room and the particular getto blaster, plus of course, the crude technique used to place the images via hearing sense only. There does not seem to be any single pattern to the size of these rosettes in terms of cross sectional diameter, or distance between one object and the next within the rosette. In several rosettes the objects are spread roughly 5 cms apart, only one is small with objects about 3 1/2 cms apart. The two largest have radii of about 6 cms. As said, at this point no definative logic seems to prevail as to how far apart the objects are supposed to be except to say they have mostly landed on the same scale approximating 5 cms for their basic radii. As just said, this may be a peculiarity of the particular getto blaster used for the experiment, or the size of the room, etc., as random variables. On the other hand the variability may be due to the size of the individual objects themselves used for the rosettes, these all being 3mm, 12mm, and 18mm in size. SPECULATION ------------------------------------------------------------- Along the way, a rosette was imaged in which each ring of objects forming a six sided rosette was about 1/2 cm further out than the ring preceeding, in a progression whose parameter was simply good sound rather than a geometric formula. The resulting image looked familiar as if for instance concentric rings of light focusing around an object, however it was not possible to determine if the image was truely a geometric progression or ad hoc since the image turned out to be unstable, and the objects kept being moved around in shoves by the sound until the rosette was recreated by hand with all objects equidistantly separated in the standard manner of equalateral triangles around a common constant radius. When graph paper with a six sided grid is obtained, an experiment will be to do a rosette with some sort of expanding outward progression in the radius between rings of objects forming the rosette, and since the objects might be glued down, it will be possible to see if such a hologramic image can re-generate sound, ie. improve the sound thus proving that locked-in-place objects can positively alter the sound in a desirable way wherein otherwise the objects would be shoved by the sound waves into those similar to grids already existing on the table top or into nothing with the images dissolved (this does happen). ALIGNMENT (November 11, 1991 continued) ------------------------------------------------------------- Most of the rosettes now sit on templates drawn on graph paper with the templates taped to the table and objects sitting (for the most part) on main hexagonal points in the templates. Templetes were drawn after the fact. Each template was drawn with roughly the diameter of an existing rosette with the purpose of making it possible to more precisely locate the right position for each object within a rosette. Finding the EXACT location for a template has been easy enough. A bead or hat was placed on the center point of the template's hexagram and the template slowly moved around a small area until the best sound was identified in assuming that the object in the center point was now sitting at a definative hot spot on the table. The remaining objects were now quickly dropped in place to create a rosette, or rather simply set in place one by one while listening. Next, the template was rotated slowly back and forth to find its final best alignment, by listening. And finally with the template taped down the objects forming the rosette were put through ultra fine tuning to the ultimate on their node locations on the template. The template alignments seem to be ad hoc, with templates rotated to the left or right relative to the east-west axis of the table. All are rotated by a minimum of 7 1/2 degrees relative to the table's east-west axis. And all are rotated in increments of 7 1/2 degrees relative to each other. These degrees are not exact measures but they are close enough to 7 1/2 degrees to say they are rotated by 7 1/2 degrees. Which is interteresting because all of the alignmemts were made by hand one by one per template. Nevertheless it turns out that 7 1/2 degrees is apparently a universal quantizing for phase shifting amongst these templates. The basic phase shift of 7 1/2 degrees relative to the east-west axis of the table may be due to the positioning of the getto blaster speakers themselves. As near as can be determined, (only a crude estimate is possible given the sculpted design of the speaker boxes) the main lateral axis of the speaker boxes (front to back) is also 7 1/2 degrees inward relative to the north-south axis of the table. The boxes were originally turned back and forth for best sounding noise when first set up at the start of the experiment and this small turning inward of the boxes may account for the universal 7 1/2 degree phase shift for all of the rosettes. (I have to say 'may account') since, at that time, no tests occurred in mind to check what might occur after turning the speaker boxes in or out to other fractal angles. These alignments (a form of phase shifting polarization) are apart from a more internal polarity factor within a rosette. Here, inside a rosette, there is another phase shifting involving a rotation around the circumpherence of the rosette, where facets of the object are best tuned when aligned along the axis leading to the center of the rosette. Similarly for the six sided beads. As stand alone objects they can sit external to a rosette but seem best facet-focused with a flat edge facing straight to the center of a nearby rosette, and in fact most of the stand alone beads have been found to work best at positions which are expansions of a rosette beyond its main hexagon. THE TABLE ------------------------------------------------------------- The so said table is actually two tables together. One is slightly more than four feet long and just under 2 1/2 feet wide. The console sits about 1/2 a foot from the left end, and the right speaker box about 1/2 a foot from the right end. The second table sits lengthwise along the left end of the first table. The right angle jog of the tables makes this second table effectively just under 2 1/2 feet long and just over 4 feet wide. The left speaker box sits in the middle at the rear of this second table. There is no reason for the use of two tables other than that one table was not long enough, and the second wouldn't fit well in the work area unless turned lengthwise, otherwise it would block the patio door. It is obvious that this arrangement is assymetrical in an extreme way but it has not been concidered crucial to the experiment since getto blasters are designed to sit around assymetrically where space can be found to sit the two speaker boxes and console, tucked into the corner of a kitchen counter, for instance. With the table array as described above, the point of greatest sonic vibration in the sound stream happens to be along the edge where the two tables touch. There is a 1/2 inch strip of wood lining the inner edge of the outside table, and a similar strip lining the back edge of the first table, and these perhaps are acting as a form of baffle, absorbing some of the sound stream. The hottest sonic vibrations actually occur along the strip of wood on the left table, expecially at the front and very back ends of the table. Double backed carpet tape of thin tape thickness has had to be used to form a layer to pin down the objects which are currently placed along this strip because prior, no matter the sound, no matter the volume, all objects placed on this strip sooner or later migrated to the left on the strip and fell off the edge. It was almost fun watching several pinecone or hat objects suddenly take off and skate toward the edge as bass passages hit on a tape. It was noticed that this abberation was not the kind which could produce visible fractal patterns in the sound stream via some media such as sand, since all of the objects migrated like lemming to the left, and became sound spoilers the instance they moved out of position. POSITIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- There does not seem to be any distinct pattern to the placement of the rosettes on the table surfaces, at this point. Two (a six-sided and twelve-sided) are on the tables, one immediately to the right of the right side loudspeaker, the other in front of that speaker. (Hereafter, the two tables will be said to be one surface, called the 'table'). Two bigger (twelve sided) rosettes are out to the left beyond the left side of the left loudspeaker one alongside the left hand speaker and the other at the very front of the table. The biggest rosette (twelve sided and whose overall size spans 190 cms) is in fact the one alongside the left speaker, whereas the six-sided rosette to the right of the right speaker spans only 100 cms. Two twelve sided rosettes (one includes a star of David) are positioned between the right speaker box and the control console between the speakers. One is at the forward edge of the table. Another, a simple six-sided figure having only seven objects, is about mid table, midway between the two speakers and to the right of the control console. (In this experiment the console early on turned out to have the least disturbing influence when sitting about 60 / 40 over to the left relative to the distance from the right speaker). In each of these placements, there is no underlying cause as to why the rosettes logically land where they do in the experiment. It only happens that each has evolved around a particular hot point in the sound stream found on the surface of the table, with the rosette images taking shape as tests were done to find out where to put particular objects for best effect. The result of this approach are the rosettes. It may be that there is a particular logic to the location of rosettes, and that other areas on the table will offer more acute accumen in overall fidelity. The trouble with this kind of experiment is that it is rather hard to move a rosette once it is in place. Something that has been learned by putting rosettes on six sided geometry templates drawn on graph paper, is that the axis of each cluster forming a rosette around a center object sounds better if aligned along its axis that radiates out from the center of the image, rather than lying along one single alignment axis in the rosette. This has already been mentioned a moment ago. That is, by placing each object on a line radiating out from a center point in a rosette, and by rotating each object to line up along the axis leading to the center of the rosette, the sound perceptibility improves. Furthermore, as already said, no rosette is aligned purely north to south straight to the back wall. All are rotated by about 7 1/2 degrees eastward or westward. One of the images is a lineal criss cross formed of beads in two straight lines crossing at right angles and rotated clockwise by exactly 30 degress. (A 48 sided polygon or star has radians spreading apart by 7 1/2 degrees. 48 is 8 six-sided hexagrams nested together) The determining factor as to why there is such a rotational symmetry has not yet been learned, but may be due to the design of the getto blaster speaker boxes themselves, and/or their alignment sitting on the table, turned inward by about 7 1/2 degrees while sitting about 5 feet apart. Another noticable sound gain (high and low) plus overall sonic improvement, happens by setting a bead on one of its six sides and turning it so that it does not sit square-on facing the back of the table or a speaker. Where such an upright bead can be aligned along a radian of a rosette the sound gain is more noticable. The problem with this is a limitation of the experiment itself. The beads are so small that it is hard to handle them in such a discreet manner. It is hard enough to use big fingers to get a small bead to sit on edge, but even harder to rotate the small bead with big fingers back and forth into its best tuned facet. Notwithstanding that the beads are small enough to stick to the fingers when handled on edge. Tweezers or stamp tongs won't work to handle the beads since the beads are too round shaped to be gripped easily with the tongs and in fact can shoot out of the tongs banging and knocking objects out of place in a most frustrating manner. So fingers it is. The problem being that the slightest displacement of the beads in this scenerio can make or break the sound advantage. Further, the slightest disturbance such as a heavy footfall on the hardwood floor can cause a standing bead to move or topple over out of focus. The net result is that most of the beads are sitting flat with only a few sitting on edge. EXPERIMENTAL UNCERTAINTY ------------------------------------------------------------- The inherent limitation of this experiment now seems to be the obects themselves used to identify the fundamental regime in the sound matrix. For instance beads that are perfectly six-sided, with a center hole that is also six sided and larger than that used for sewing thread, are intuited to be better for use in such an experiement, and perhaps a little larger than the beads being used. In any case, also sitting on edge and facet focused (turned to where the best sound results) is anticipated to produce a very superior high/low range and overall big open sound fidelity as for instance with a sympany orchestra recorded live. But I can only speculate about this at the moment since I don't have such beads. They will have to be hand made in the future I suspect. A second experimental uncertainty is inherent in the cartwheels both 18mm and 12mm used for the clusters and rosettes. Clusters are now said to be composite objects earlier called pinecones and hats, the hats being a 12mm cartwheel topped with a bead, and the pinecones being a 12mm cartwheel topped by an 18mm cartwheel topped by a 12mm cartwheel. Larger composites (lets call these palm trees) were tried consisting of up to six or more 18mm cartwheels stacked in a tower but these were found to actually muffle sound even when seeming to boost the volume of sound such as in the bass range. Each of the objects now in use has been filed into six sided facets and when filed produce noticable improvement in overall sound fidelity. Any that were not filed, when replaced by one which was filed, produced an improvement in sound, without exception. Filed objects worked best. However the amount of filing for this home experiment is self limited. The so-called cartwheels have six round fan-like wings sticking out in a six sided array around a center hole used for sewing thread since these cartwheels are actually ornimental beads sold in a craft store. I have been able to file the roundness into three flat edges around the outer rim of each leaf but do not have the tools or dexterity to get inside nearer the center holes to file more. Further, the leaves of the cartwheels are thick in the center and thinner around the edge and are arbitrary in manufacture (ie. do not conform to (say) a 30 degree slope to the center bulge which would thus conform to six-sided twelve-sided geometry. Given a re-design of all parts of the cartwheel with a new design specifically of anglular embodiments and flat edges all conforming to (cubic) six-sided twelve-sided shape, it is anticipated that the cartwheels could produce far more in the way of overall positive fidelity, leading to a possible result that (for instance) fewer clusters or arrays would need be placed on the table top to get a better overall result in both gain of sound volume, and even more extension of sound range into higher and lower frequency, and improved enhancement in fidelity leading to more authentic reproduction of original sound. The word audiophile comes to mind thus. Who knows if there are other symmetical shapes which are more to the point of principle. For instance 33 pointed stars or 33 sided polygons added in to the matrix to assist certain aspects of sound. The point is that a basic six-sided symmetry definitely embodies fundamental properties in sound waves. It comes back to the image of snowflakes made of points of light in standing locations floating in the room and harmonically intermeshed right down to atomic lattice levels. OBSERVATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- At this point the experiment has become subjective in that it is distinctly possible that the objects used (beads, small cartwheels, and large cartwheels) are imparting their own coloration to the sound on a universal basis - change the object and thus change the coloration. Further, improve the overall verity to true six sided-twelve sided geometry through all aspects in all objects used, and perhaps any coloration currently imparted by such objects will disappear. This can't be known until better objects are tried. As for fundamentally reproducing original sound as it existed before the original recording of it, may or may not be possible, if in fact the whole recorded sound does in fact includes all higher and lower holophonic subsonics which contain everything of the original sound but are seemingly lost (but not actually erased) due to loudspeaker limitations and poor recording techniques. If true 100% six-twelve sided geometry is used in a future experiment, it might be possible to hear more than what seems to exist in a particular recorded media or recording, you might be able to get more than what is actually on the tape in terms of real notes, if the upper and lower subsonnics of a note can be teased to life to replace the note actually missing due to the recording technique. For instance I have a Duke Ellingston cassette bought at the discount wrack for $2.89 and only today I learned (Nov. 17, 1991) that some of the cuts are actually lifted from old platter recordings or LP because sound sensitivy in the experiment can determine now that pops and crackles plus occasion rushing sounds are from the grooves of the LP and of greater interest is that really good sound can now be coaxed out of this poor second hand information. For instance the bass initially is what you would expect, taken from an old LP or 78 recording (I don't know which). Notwithstanding the bass fiddle is essentially without definition only a quiet boom-like whomp whomp and the bass drum is hardly more than a faint echo with occasion thumps in it, at least this is what the tape produced when last played three months ago. But today I had the foot pedal working away on the old bass drum, and true grunting sounds in the bass fiddle of this cheap Duke Elington tape, leading me to believe that more will be possible in the handling of sound via use of fractal rosette principles to control the 'imaging' of sound. The breakthrough today was not by setting up anything special, it was by simple thinking things are sounding pretty good now and I ponder what that cheap essentially unplayable Duke Ellingstone tapes sounds like now. And there it is, bad recording techniques being re-polarized into fidelity. Nice. CURRENT STATUS ------------------------------------------------------------- It is certainly obvious that the experiment itself, as it currently sits, handily gets around design limitations in the loudspeakers and enclosure cabinetes, in that the current state of the experiment reproduces loud deep fully tonal tympanies and deep solid bass fiddle grunts which in the normal getto blaster are simply not heard and which cause the speakers to break up in cone splacking pops and rattles or meaningless turbo roar which can literally drive the enclosures forward across the table top if certain rosettes or even beads are not perfectly focused (in place) at the right hot spots. Or else sluggish toneless echoing to comprise the bottom end (as was with the Duke Ellington tape). The extension of sound in the experiment includes of course higher frquencies. What is heard as a faint pssst or pissing via the tiny one inch metal tweeters, can be resolved into drummers wailing away on big and small zildian cymbals, with drummer dexterity and nuances clearly heard in the rythms and stick strikes. In fact good drummers make use of the sound of the sticks themselves in their sonic techniques and now you can HEAR the sound of the sticks themselves as they strike the cymbols, apart from the cymbols. Not to mention triangles and whistles, heard for the first time on tapes already played hundreds of times in earlier parts of the experiment. AN EXPERIMENTER'S PROBLEM TO CONCIDER ------------------------------------------------------------- The hand of the observer intruding into the sound stream to move a bead or insert an object can dramatically effect the sound until the hand is removed. Also, (in this case), the body leaning close to the cabinetes of the getto blaster's speakers can influence the sound, both good, and lousy. What is to understand here is, that, after a time, the ears become accustomed to anticipating what sound comes in with the hand or body, and so work around that to get to the nitty gritty of the honest sound within the rosettes as experiments take place. Mind you there is a learning curve to this. A sense of the honest sound is eventually developed so well that changes by intruders such as a finger or the hand is not a problem. QUESTIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- There is no indication at this point as to whether the fundamental sound matrix is a moire pattern which is lineal, or logrythmic. That is, does a 'cm' become two 'cms' a certain distance out from a speaker. What leads to this uncertainty is an oppositive observation. A six sided rosette was created using seven of the clusters called hats (12mm cartwheels topped with beads), with six hats around a center hat at a uniform distance of about 4 cm radius. This was set on a geometric six-sided image drawn with compass and ruler on a piece of graph paper. The rosette was then moved further out from the rear of the table by about 12 1/2 cms to another hot spot. However, despite a gain in volume, the sound became distorted, which was cured by enlarging the rosette to a radius of about 5 1/4 cm. This may not have enlarged due to a more foward position because three of the bigger rosettes sit right back near the speakers and three average sized (smaller) rosettes are at the front of the table. When moving the above mentioned rosette foward it was observed that a perfect six sided symmetry had to be maintained in that when the rosette moved forward toward the front of the table it unformly needed a single larger radius to become focused in its new position. If a fundamental matrix were logrythmic or non-recurrent, it might have happened that the radius of the forward pieces of a rosette would be spaced farther apart than for the rearward objects in a given rosette so that a continuously expanding spread could be seen between a first (rearward rosette) and any created further out on the table. However such a continuous spreading is definately not seen, or at least is not seen without question in this experiment. For that matter, at this moment such a 'spreading' is not even indicated. What is seen is that a rosette seems most stable with a true equal radius throughout a rosette no matter where it is, in spite of the fact that some clusters migrate off position in loud sound tests while others are constantly stable despite the volume. Leading to some ambiguity as to knowing whether the clusters are best in perfect true rosettes or am I looking at a logriythmic expansion in the overall matrix image further and further from the speakers, but am masking it by clumsy techniques. Also, at this point, nothing can be said about vertical rosettes, clusters, or any object placed six inches or two feet above the table since I have no way of easily doing this at the moment. I do know that a cluster placed on the floor, or on a high shelf against the opposite wall, can have a noticable effect on good vrs bad sound. In fact these days every object in the room now effects the sound depending on where the object is put. This includes mundanes such as pencil, eraser, file, pair of plyers. In other words sensitivity enhanced by the rosettes is now reaching out to become more interactive with mundane objects in a most noticable way. Another thing of interest is that some of the best upper frequency sound resolution came by lining a number of beads in a few straight lines, perhaps six or eight beads all in a row forming the line. Noticed is that for lines running roughly north/south (ie. rear to foward on the table) the beads can end up placed as sets of beads constantly the same distance apart per set rather than increasingly separated the further out on the line from the rear wall, hence dimishing the prospect that a logrythmic or non lineal progression is involved over lengthened distance away from the sound source. This constancy turns out to have an easy explanation, being due to the fact that lining (say) three beads in a line is no different than placing three beads across the diameter of a rosette. CREATIVE VARIABLES ------------------------------------------------------------- One thing done out of the ordinary is that the getto blaster's four equalizer toggles were pushed all the way to the top and left there. This was at the very start in the first week of the experiment. Some stereo buffs would say this is the worst thing to do, since having especially the high end equalizers on full fools the machine so it doesn't know what it is doing. I did it so I could hear distortion better and so seek to control it. Another electronic factor was in eventually shutting off the "SURROUND" sound feature. Modern sound systems (circ. 1991) have a "SURROUND" feature which can enhance the seeming performance of most systems, by imparting a subtle echo effect into the music giving the illusion of a more 'live' sound. About half way through the experiment (after two months) it began to be noticed that the "SURROUND" feature was imparting some hissing distortion in the high end. Shutting it off meant loosing a lot of bass. However the particular irritating static instantly disappeared. So now it was a new round of tests to try and get back the deeper bass end that disappeared with the "SURROUND" feature off. This was accomplished. And now (nearly five months after the start of the experiment) turning on the "SURROUND" results can mean instant fierce hiss and spitting in the high end, and NO BASS. The toleration level for the racket is about 3 seconds. How about that. What has happened is that the experiment has externally advanced beyond certain strained effects imparted electronically by the so called enhancement feature of the original "SURROUND" sound, and has gone straight ahead into focusing of positive re-enforcement in the room echoes themselves. As another example, I have nearly doubled the gain in volume. Right now (November 17, 1991) I am using a volume gain of 30% in the volume control knob (number 30 to 40 in numbers 10 to 100). This is for loud volume tests. Three weeks ago I was setting the volume control to 50-55 to get the same volume on most tapes. This has happened because in recent fine tuning of the rosettes and in particular select beads and hats of a rosette, one of the fidelity factors to listen for can come with a sudden hike in volume, which can vary from the faint, to a noticable spike like a switch has been thrown, when for instance a bead filed to six sides is slowly rotated back and forth on the spot, or slowly moved through an area no larger than the bead's own diameter of 3mm. By moving the beads very slowly the spikes can be heard without difficulty because the new sitting of the bead (or hat) has to first engage both the forward and reflecting sound patterns for both to become synchronized to produce the spike in volume and this means a delay of about half a second or more until the spike hits. As this more powerful resonance fidelity of the system is being unfolded, it is becoming increasingly easy to hear the spikes in the volume and good things happen for instance a somewhat muffled tympany can suddenly become two clear tympanies playing their strong deep tones together in a symphony orchestra. PRINCIPLE OBSERVATION ------------------------------------------------------------- There is a logical progression to this. First, geometric fractal images are pinned down by the use of small solid objects, with the effect that the solid images serve to pin down the fidelity of the sound, with the result that the pinned down fidelity emphatically regulates the sound both PROJECTING and REBOUNDING. Obviously this suggests there is a major fundamental principle within the geometric fractal understructure linking the hand made fractal patterns to a primary nature in the propigation itself of sound. SUMMARY OBSERVATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- This sound CARRIES. With rosettes in place this sound carries farther than you would expect expecially from a getto blaster. This sound seems to wrap itself around corners, even creeping out the door and up the corridor. It does not drop off as the square of the distance from the speaker boxes. For example, fresh from the store, 50% to 60% is a normal high volume for such a getto blaster. That is loud, but it does not get any louder after that despite cranking the volume more. With rosettes in place 12% volume can be enough in the late evening. Tell tale however is that at that volume and at my front door the sound takes a small drop then carries on at the same volume 74 feet up the corridor to an entrance area, and even through into the outer area and out the front door and you can still hear the music coming from the little Fisher model 8400 getto blaster sitting inside my condo against the far back wall, on the table against my dining room wall, at only 12% volume. That sound is travelling a long way without question. So SOMETHING beside common fidelity is being enhanced in a re-enforcing way by the holophonic sound principles inherent in the fractal rosettes. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY VIBRATORY EFFECTS ------------------------------------------------------------- A major question is raised as to WHAT effects in sound are actually being imaged in the cubic properties of the fractal rosettes. It seems there is a PRIMARY effect and a SECONDARY effect. The primary effect is the carrying of sound propigating from source to some object the sound strikes. The secondary effect is what happens to the object after it is struck by the sound. For instance a table top vibrates. And so a person is immediately thoughtful of the possibility of using that vibration to image true rosettes of the sound. But this might or might not be possible, or at least, if possible not easily done. Concider the following: Using a large flat table obviously the thing to do is sprinkle something on it and watch sonic patterns unfold when sound is turned on at loud volume. The something sprinkled could be (say) iron filings, or sand. I tried ordinary table salt but it didn't budge an inch, not even sprinkled on the most vigorously vibrating part of the table. But I did think perhaps something less uniformly regular, such as crushed quartz, might vibrate around better. The environment has to be as static free as possible. A tiny fragment of cigarette ash can drift to the table and noticably effect the sound in a detrimental way. Even a coffe grain falling from the edge of a coffee cup can land on the table as a spoiler. The thing about spoilers is they cling in place due to static. So the ideal table surface should be as friction free as possible, and also static free. Then, lets see what happens. Can some powder or perhaps crushed quartz vibrate in a strong sound source sufficiently to produce visible rosettes or fractal images via the secondary media due to sound holgraphic principles, the holographics being duly transferred from the sound source (loudspeakers) to the solid state physics properties of the table. Bear in mind that any vibratory pattern which might be seen by such a method may not in fact correspond to the holographic undercore geometry of the thing. It is known that master makers of guitars and violins sprinkle sawdust on the back or front of an instrument looking for sonic nodes to tell them where to sand next, and how much sanding is needed to get the wood to resonate with the right stuff to become a superior quality instrument. But this is resultant vibration in a media, such as the sandlewood or rosewood being used for a guitar, and such second hand vibration has nothing to do with primary resonance which is the propigation of the sound itself to the media BEFORE the vibrations seen as sonic nodes in the sawdust. Such nodes as on instrument woods being tested in fact are more or less nothing but a vague clumping, outlining some peaks and valleys in vibratory resonances of the media such as the wood, enhanced by such factors to identify places for sanding and sculpting, in fact these are more or less nothing but a vague clumping, outlining some peaks and valleys in vibratories aided by the sound chambers and support parts within the instrument. The effect in the transferring of sound through the sound chamber itself is not imaged by those sonic nodes seen in the sawdust. And so, any potential imaging of the primary vibration of the propigation of the sound through the media, for instance within the resonating chambers of a violin, or from stereo loudspeakers, will require some ingenuity on the part of a deft thinker. This is because what you normally see in secondary resonance is only a clumping of the vibrating stuff (sawdust) into mounds and ridges, showing where patterns of sonic nodes and re-enforcement occur. If rosettes can be manifested in patterns of vibrating stuff, in this case rosette inherency would then be known to be similar in certain regards to a macro version of a quantum effect, in which (for instance) photons are carriers of electromagnetic information whereas cubic fractals transfer copies of holophonic information through carrier medias such as the molecules of air and molecules of wood in the table. These quantum rosettes would not twist and distend rather the radii of rosettes would expand or contract, and new rosettes would instantly spring into place to fill voids and gaps in the distances over which the primary sound effect travels. For instance if a baffle is moved back or forward by a meter or two in front of a playing guitar, while at the same time a five sided figure or a square made of sticks (assuming such figures are dire spoilers) is taped to then removed from sound ports of the quitar, two different things would happen. New fractal rosettes in recurring images would have to blink into place to accomodate the change in distances as the baffle is moved, since the sound of the quitar will not much change. Whereas the fractal rosettes would have to change size and appearance in accordance with imposed changes in the kind of sound with the stick figures hanging around the ports spoiling things. Then, if the original fractal rosettes (or reasonable facimilies) hoving around invisibly in the air could somehow be re-created to replace the new rosette images caused by the spoilers, it might occur that the original good sound could now re-appear, despite the rubber duck spoilers still in place. This can explain why fractal rosettes on a table top can purify the sound of a badly flawed getto blaster stereo system horking away in a small cluttered work area. It should be mentioned that the getto blaster speakers of the experiment are not passing a vibration directly to the table top via vibrational contact when sitting on the table. In fact the speaker boxes now are sitting on small wads of masking tape folded sticky side out to pin down the boxes to fixed positions so they can't power thrust around in the chance occurance of a temporary turbo roar when a high volume test goes awry. In fact when a speaker box is held about 1 1/2 cm in the air there is a likeable immediate difference in the quality of the sound. In this instance, the speaker box is not making solid contact with the table, and thus there is not a solid physical contact needed in a transferring of sonic vibrations to produce rosette imagery. CONCLUDING COMMENT ------------------------------------------------------------- I can close with a test case set of definitions. It seems as this writing was being typed in the computer that the term rosette has become associated with two types. 1. Cubic rosettes imply those that are invisible in the third dimension to human's eyes, those that hang floating in a room like super snowflakes finished with their star of David points clear everywhere, made of points of light with thin invisible straight lines identifying and linking their harmonic cubic symmetry which is fundamentally six sided. 2. Fractal rosettes are those that can be created using physical objects to form images that are empirical and stationary. For instance on my table the images that enhance the performance of the getto blaster speakers are fractal rosettes. Of note regards these solid forms is they do not pulsate like undulating waves. In terms of physics, individual objects comprising the fractal rosettes vibrate. In fact, beads have been seen to vibrate enough to suddenly end up standing right up on edge in a number of different hats when certain symphonic bass notes have been hit in loud volume tests and at times a bead has been seen to land in front of the eyes hopping from out of nowhere by some force in the sound. And if accidently concentrating with the right abstract state of mind it has been possible to see a hat actually vibrate so fast as to become momentarily blurred. 3. The term fractal itself has been taken from two directions: the form of mathematics (not my discipline but seen illustrated in Discovery magazine) being used to analyze the jagged outlines of mountain ridges and sea coasts: and that such as from computer generations comprising a form of modern art with a similiar same six sided design being magnified into larger recurrences and diminishing into spiral-like curls around the tips of Stars of David. It is this form of the fractal concept which I see associating with the term 'fractal rosettes'. However I don't see that there should be fractual curling at the tips of the stars. To compensate, I would say I see other small fractals of different designs would take the place of curls, and may even array like miniature cushions just above or below or beyond a tip, in parallel planes at different elevations to compensate for space contractions converging around the tips. These would be three dimensional in that the inner phase shifting aligned along axis to centerpoints would include horizontal and vertical measures. In reality, these fractals would be unlike actual snowflakes which are essentially flat plane manifestations, but bearing in mind that snowflakes might crudely model such fractals if a number of snowflakes of different sizes were mixed and sorted to see if they could be pieced together (fitted together) like a jigsaw puzzle, leaving no empty gaps. If this is true it would be a third major kind of fractal. I understand that certain recent mathmaticians are exploring fractal insights into far reaching realms of cosmology and other forms of theoretical cause and effect. 4. A thought has just occurred in retrospect as to how to use light to see rosettes formed in the air by a sound stream. Beaming laser light into an area diffused with fine particulate fine enough to hang rather than settle out, and disturbing the particulates with a strong sound stream such as a word shouted repeated, will not reveal rosettes in the simple fact of the rosettes vibrating to quickly for their outlines to be visible. Perhaps high speed photography or video which can be slowed to slow motion and very slow motion, might reveal the vibratories - this is the work of laboratories with high definition equipment - I am out of that loop. SPECULATION (Pure Original Sound) (November 17, 1991) ------------------------------------------------------------- I have a secret feeling that fractal rosettes can be re-created to stimulate the sound per its original form before being recorded, ie. as originally played before playback through some electronic artifact such as a tape, LP, or CD player. In this feeling is an idea that the original sound is a composite of hard mainframe virbations plus an even greater realm in soft subsonic harmonics constituting the timbre of a particular sound and of course the subsonics include natural room reflections as part of the subliminal resonances working all the way up and down the sound spectrum. This soft part of the sound spectrum of an instrument's notes can't be eliminated by digital tampering since such would have to eliminate everything constituting the note, whose constructions can link with the harmonics of another instrument producing a third sound complete with its own characteristics, and these qualities can change even as a musician opens or closes their mouth while sawing on a bass fiddle during the recording session. Another example of subsonic influence is two human voices singing the same notes in perfect synchronization and so sound like a single voice far different than the sound of either of the contributing voices. A few instances of such augmentation are well known. For example it is very hard to discern the input of either Art Garfunkle's or Paul Simon's voice on their "Bridge Over Troubled Water's" recording. Also, Tchaikovsky the composer was able to harmonize certain instruments so well in for example the Nutcracker Suite that the harmonizers sound like an entirely unique different instrument even though such an instrument doesn't physically exit. Glen Miller also comes to mind as another example of achieving outstanding changes in sound due to deft use of harmonics that involve subsonic re-enforments between different instruments. In further example, a violin section in an orchestra can become sonicallly greater than the contribution of the violins per se, when the violins all playing the same thing simultaneously can start a new resonance in sound involving all of the violins. (But, this is getting almost tautological except a point is being made). So assume that all subsonics (whether staying within the sound of a given instrument or haronizing with other instruments or also with non musical artifacts in the recording studio) are recorded on a media (such as tape for distrubution by tape, LP, or for CD cassette) in the recording studio even if the recording quality of the subsonics is faint or disturbed. And when played back, the reproducers (speakers) cannot reproduce certain parts of the sound. For instance a musician sawing on the bass fiddle might not be heard because the speakers can't go that low. Then certainly the sound change coming in when the musician yawned will not probably be noticed (too subtle). It may be that even with the best speakers available, certain sounds do not get reproduced that were in the original sound being recorded in the studio. However, all of the higher and lower frequency subsonics of that event could have been captured in some degree via the original recording techniques of the studio and are still coming through the electronics of the reproducing system even if the speakers themselves can't handle it. Digital recording can further be a spoiler since the program has to be massive enough to be able to digitally pattern all of the possible subsonics no matter how faint to really do a complete job, even though technicians say the ear can be fooled by leaving out good portions of the sound stream when digitally detailing the recording and master mix. Then there is the problem of electronic effectation due to a recording technique itelf; the steady state coloration which solid state electronics imparts to modern day Hi Fi, and lack of hang in the big notes that used to be taken for granted in the test tube days. And then some turkey makes a reproduction of a reproduction, (dubs a tape) and oboy is it bad, really distorted and no bass and a screetch for a high end. Lots of problems. Lots of problems. However, lets suppose that the subsonics in fact comprise a form of an intrinsic hologram implant not the same as but similar to images on a photo film reproduced by laser light. Even a tiny fragment of the film can reproduce the whole holgram picture albeit more blurred. Suppose then that fractal rosettes are like that, in being able to handle subsonics that are otherwise invisible to the reproducing technology due to limits in the loudspeaker or badly recorded versions. I can see the possibility that with fractal rosettes identified and spread around speakers the hidden (invisible) subsonics can be leased and tweaked into coming to life. So that even if the carrier wave stored on a tape cannot show a sine wave for (for instance) the bassist sawing on the bass fiddle, the subsonics associated with that sound can be re-enforced in a positive way after the fact to rejuvinate or recreate the original bass player's input. However this is only a speculation, a hypothesis to look into. STEREO EFFECT ------------------------------------------------------------- November 18, 1991. Until today, the imaging of the sound was more or less standard for stereo sets, ie. left to right but no depth in terms of any back projection deep into the stage behind the speakers. Sound tests were always done at the table with an ear cocked either to the left or right speaker with occasionally something heard in the opposite speaker when a bead or object being tuned through (say) the right speaker tweeked some distinct iota of sound through the left speaker. For instance a banjo might be heard peaking through the left speaker but otherwise it was playing through the right on a high volume sound test using the 101 Strings Orchestra (which often could become the 1001 Strings Orchestra screetching away during sound tests, by the way). The point being that stereo was typically flat wall with both standard stereo effects prevailing - a jet roaring past from left to right, similarly for electronic music swinging from left to right, back to left. Also, turning off one or the other speaker resulted in the standard total differences in the sound track for either speaker. Now to the point. A hat (12mm cartwheel with bead on top) was set on the case of the computer to the right of the right hand speaker. As this object was being focused, of a sudden the banjo was heard to leap back into the window, (this was on a cassette tape of Duke Ellington). Ohoh thought I! I made the musician move his chair. However several quick tests with other objects yielded not much more in the way of musicians moving their chairs. Which triggered a new round of tests. Objects were tried in different locations around the room, for instance on the TV set in the far back corner of the living area. Four long distance external places were tried in the room. The result of this was something better in the overall sound, particularly in hang of the drum set and clearer use of the bass pedal on the bass drum. But, then, suddenly, ergo, stereo imaging came into being by the simply expediency of placing a hat up on the window ledge behind the table. To make a long story short, the sound is quite literally now OUT OF THE BOXES and behind the dining area windows, with four hats sitting on the window ledge doing the job. Where formerly I heard with ear cocked to the right hand or left hand speaker I now hear sound spread out like an orchestra behind the stereo set even when leaning close to either speaker. There was not a terrific fidelity gained by this. In fact subtle distortions or muffling in the bass range have become much more obvious due to the fact that deep bass hang is not yet in focus properly and it seems it may take some work twiddling and tweeking amongst rosettes and rosette objects to get this stablized (if possible), now that east/west/north/south stereo re-imaging has been achieved with the sound now out of the boxes and back into a studio or real room environment as when initially recorded. MORE TESTS ------------------------------------------------------------- November 19, 1991. Its a whole new ball game. I can now suppose that most of the fidelity in terms of 'real live sound' in stereo and sound systems is lost due to compression between the north/south polarity of the sound. This is the front to back imaging. You might call the loss the 'cyclorama' effect. A 'cyclorama' is a large curved curtain made of canvas used in making motion pictures. The cyclorama can be three stories high and 300 feet long. On it is painted the backdrop. For instance Hank Hunk and Girl Galore are standing on a veranda with the whole town in the background but actually the whole town is a painting three stories high and 300 feet long. It creates the illusion of depth (in the movie) but is essentially a flat or gently curved screen. This is the 'cyclorama effect' of most modern and old fashion stereo systems. Even modern day stereo is a cinerama, a wide screen affair which lacks a real 3-dimensional stereoscopic depth. UPDATE 1: November 19, 1991. ------------------------------- I can hear now, with just an hour spent adjusting beads and tops in terms of the new north/south imaging achieved yesterday, that pretty well all difficult areas in tapes expecially symphony such as Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto, (and jazz recorded with high gain mikes literally shoved up the instruments), that a certain wax in the ear effect which seems to be always present in stereo can now be heard to be compression, substantially resolved by having moved the image of the sound back, thus re-creating the musicians as a three dimensional orchestra arrayed out there like a stereoscopic concert hall front to back as well as wide side to side behind the windows. UPDATE 2: November 19, 1991. ------------------------------------------------------------- You should hear Tchaikovsky. For instance screetching violins are resolved into symphony sonics by tuning a violin out of the box, by ultra fine adjustment of one or two objects. Its the background echoes, those reflective sounds coming back from behind in front of the the orchestra in the recording studio that are now putting real live "life" in the music. It seems the cyclorama effect has failed all these years because the imaging could NOT recieve the background reflections (from behind and in the front of the orchestra) and reproduce them again behind the orchestra in a living room. UPDATE 3: November 19, 1991. ------------------------------- It is also now evident as to why moving an object such as a hat or pineapple by tiny iotas rotated on the spot or moved about an area less than its radius, can have such dramatic effect on parts of the sound range. Its in the faceting. Picture now a symphony orchestra swinging away on Tchaikovsky, and in the middle of the image behind the windows is a violinist playing solo up at the front of the orchestra (for the purposes of the recording in the studio). Now, back in the far rear corner of the room around the corner from the dining area, standing back there at the TV set, is me slowly rotating a hat (a 12mm cartwheel with bead on top) back and forth on the spot, in ultra fine moves so slight it hardly amounts to more than pressure in my fingers to constitute the move. Why does this effect the sound of the violin and orchestra? Because it is a long distance from the hat to the image of the violin, and the faceted hat is sending phase polarized reflections back to the image of the violin which have to be focused perfectly in order to synch with the image. The focusing over such a long distance has to be precise to accomodate the 'lighthouse' effect, wherein a lighthouse beacon can sweep a mile at long distances with only a tiny rotational turn of the light, so only miniscule rotations of the light must be exacted to focus the beacon to an observer several 'miles' away (several dozen feet away). The quality of phase polarized focusing amongst the reflections is of sound as now seen to obviously influence the whole of the experiment. Only now, a new dimensional axis (so to speak) has been added, this is the aspect of north/south (front to back) imaging in the stereo sound and the consequences are very clear: first; it is a lot harder to focus an object, since only tiny iotas of move may be involved in the focus; and second, when focused, the positive effects on the sound are much more evident. UPDATE 4: November 19, 1991. ------------------------------ Expansion of the rosettes proceeding further and further from the sound seems quantal rather than lineally logrythmic, as a picture in the consciousness. For instance the rosettes would maintain roughly the same inner diameter, and expand with more activity in concentric expansions around the perimeter until enough space has been created in the opening of space over distance further away from the sound source to allow a new rosette to blink into existence. A model of this would be something like fitting similar and recurring snowflakes into place in a larger and larger circular jigsaw puzzle. UPDATE 5: November 20, 1991. ------------------------------------------------------------- The fact of a common radii of rouphly 5 cm amongst the rosettes may be co-incidentally due to the actual size of the speaker drivers of the getto blaster which also happen to be roughly 5 cms in radius (10 cms in diameter). The width between human ears (mine) may also be a factor delimiting root sizes of the rosettes. SUBSONICS in the NORTH/SOUTH POLARITY ------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE 6: November 21, 1991. ------------------------------- There is no doubt now that much sound from a reproducing sound source is lost due to North/South phase polarity compression of the kind which results in the 'cycloramic' effect in stereo, the wax-in-the-ear form of fidelity, the absence of fresh air sound. The 'EXPERIMENT' has now taken quite a different direction. First of all the DBE (Dynamic Bass Expander) has been shut off. Shutting the DBE off initially results in an immediate loss of much of the bass, and an immediate drop of about 20% in the gain of the volume. At the moment the DBE was shut off there was also an increase in the so-called electronic hiss. However within a couple of hours all this has changed, for the better, with some new things learned. This is described next. MULTI BODIED PROBLEM ------------------------------------------------------------- It is abundantly clear by now that playing with the rosettes is dealing with a multi-bodied problem, with dozens and dozens of unknowns comprising the ever existing state of the 'EXPERIMENT'. It turns out that rather than one exact position for each bead or object, the position varies in regard to the position of every other bead, object, or rosette in the room. To be more explicit, as (say) a hat object (12mm cartwheel with a bead on top) is adjusted, many other objects and beads need re-adjusting to accomodate the change in inter-phasing polarities. It is no different than tweeking (say) dozens of knobs simultan- eously on a large control panel, except the knobs are beads and objects which have to be tweeked one by one. So the 'EXPERIMENT' now consists of going around and around the work area, minutely adjusting beads and objects for better effect, and then starting the round again, going over the same territory again and again gradually bringing forth more bigger bass, gain in volume, and better all around Hi Fidelic sound. The first thing that is obvious, now that the DBE (Dynamic Bass Expander) is off, is that the so-called Hi Fidelity is definitely improved. As is imaging behind the dining area windows. For instance using the Duke Ellington tape, the orchestra is now spread well back on a stage stereosonically spreading out backward beyond the window. And now we have further things to notice. It turns out that some of the muffling and distortion which has been (was) coming and going in tuning the objects is due to North/South compression, and this finding is leading to interesting consequence. I am now deliberately listening for certain kinds of muffling which can come in when certain objects are tuned, because I can get the muffling out by tuning certain other objects and beads. The reason why I am doing it this way is that the muffling may hold some imaging quality masked until it is clearified suddenly by ultra fine tuning. The idea is that I am getting more and more back to the orchestra in the sense of it seeming real and not simulated. For instance suppose in a room or auditorium listening to the former Duke Ellingston orchestra live, it is obvious that the cymbols of the drummer are not right up in your face, or sharply distinct over the sound of other instruments. In fact the cymbols are rather weak, but ring in a way that spreads around the sound source (ie. the drummer). Similarly, the bass is not strongly dominant, even where miking is used to amplify the bass through speakers used by the band. In either case (a musician standing playing the bass fiddle with no miking or playing with mikes) the bass sound pervades, rather than dominates at a single local source. These pervasive effects are now starting to be tuned into the 'EXPERIMENT', because the natural echoing (which was being masked by the subtle artificial echoing caused by the DBE and by some compression techniques added by the recording studio, and/or repro factory making tapes or cd's, is no longer interferring with the natural North/South (front to back) phase polarization in the sound itself. Now that natural reverberating echo can be heard as a distinct effect, it is now possible to start tuning it in via the beads and rosettes with single minded vigor. But once again (as just pointed out) the tuning is now a multi boiled (multi-bodied) problem in the full sense of the term 'multi bodied'. The turning or subtle repositioning of any object results in a phase shift which effects the positioning of each other object in the 'EXPERIMENT'. So the task now is to keep going around and around in circles gradually tightening the pattern, so to speak. At this point, most of the bass which vanished when the DBE was turned off is back, although the bass is still not back to a lot of power at the bottom of the bass end. On the other hand nearly the whole of the loss in the volume when the DBE was first shut off is back in fact there now may be some more basic volume then before. This is because it is a lot easier to hear subtle changes good or bad in the tuning of the hats and beads, and so more iotas of improvement are happening in the tuning which includes small gains in sound volume through beads or objects which formerly did not seem to contribute a great deal. Fortunately the beads present far less of a problem than the objects. In fact the beads present a new bonus, this being that as room reverberation (echoing) is brought further under control, the effects cause by a bead become more distinct and so they are now far easier to tune. A surprising developement not heard until the DBE was shut off, was that tuning the beads can directly effect the success of the North/South phase polarity. Merely rotating a bead roughly one sixth of its circumpherence can result in a part of the orchestra to shift around side to side or backward or forward behind the windows. Up until now it was thought that all the beads did was offer gain in volume and some boost in bass or high end or some improvement in fidelity. Now, even the beads can offer improvement in both the higher end and lower end in the sound simultaneously when tuned back and forth, and now, as well, positioning of the sound image itself. Tuning is now more than ever a question of facet turning, where the straight line face of a bead, one of its six sides, strongly effects sound depending on the direction the facet is facing. Another effect now noticed is it is better to have the beads sitting flat instead of on edge. In fact beads on the hat objects tend more than before to now tune themselves, they stand up when strong bass notes occur but this time they seem to stand up in a re-enforcing of the polarity rather than going out of focus as was happening before when the DBE was in. But this 'better automatic aligning' is only an impression at the moment, and beads spontaneously re-aligning themselves does not happen often. Regarding the so-called 'electronic hiss', this doesn't seem to be an artificial problem caused by electronic noise. I can tune hiss out completely. However hiss can come back with the adjustment of a bead. But, the good news is that in the hiss is improper North/South phase polarization alignment, and the plain fact is that by focusing an object for better 'live sound' the hiss can disappear as some Hi Fi is gained, and there is a profound silence in the background of the music. At the moment I have only touched on this profound silence. It comes and goes as I swing around and around through the tunings of the objects and rosettes. Nonetheless the 'EXPERIMENT' is now heading towards a maximum in reproduction authenticity. There is of course the problem of studio techniques in the selection and position of various instruments being featured during solos. For instance a trumpet can still be heard standing aritificially up front and now noticably extra loud, during its solo. BALANCING THE IMAGE ------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE 8: November 21, 1991. ------------------------------- NOW, the concept of BALANCING the sound takes on a new meaning. It is somewhat like what must be the experienced in trying to balance a heavy metal ring in the air over a high temperature superconducting current. I now have the 101 Strings Orchestra playing Western Themes. No point in lying; this has always been a difficult tape due to the 1001 screetching strings which were a common effect with THIS tape. It happened, in tuning one of the hat objects on the right side of the table, that the whole violin section suddenly shifted from the vacinity of the left hand speaker and moved back deep into the window over to the left of the sound stage, and presto most of the screetch vanished. Very quickly after this other objects were newly 'phase adjusted' with very satisfying results, but now ALWAYS with the added necessity of keeping the sound stage balanced in terms of three dimensional locations behind the windows. Believe me this is not nearly so easy as it sounds. I must now listen carefully to everything from highest to lowest sound range while simultaneously keeping keen monitoring of the real positions of the orchestra, when minutely adjusting a bead or object. The slow motion tediousness is starting to pay off in a new way. Everything in the room is starting to scintillate with sound. When rotating a hat you can feel the scintillation under your fingertips as strong vibrations which resist being damped if you squeeze. But something else is starting to stand up to spoil progress. How, specifically, can I tell WHERE sections of an orchestra are supposed to be positioned, so I can put them there. A Xaviar Cugat brazilian style tape is a good case in point. One of its tracks has latin rattles and castinettes beating away vigorously at the left side of the orchestra and far to the rear, but on another track these instruments are being played up front beside a singer who seems to be toward the right hand of the stage rather than right up front with a mike stuck up the nose. Tapes like this present imaging problems because the basic character of the orchestra, its sections and instruments, are varied in major ways track to track. And so a finite limitation may have been reached in pure imaging tests in this experiment. REAL PROBLEMS ------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE 9: November 27, 1991. (Noon) --------------------------------------- Time in the last few days has been spent on a problem which may not have a solution in the environment in which the 'EXPERIMENT' is being conducted. Specifically, an attempt has been made to try to pin down the bottom bass range into a stable setting. The problem has been all along; given the objects used for the beads and rosettes plus the constantantly variable random environment of the room itself; that the 'EXPERIMENTAL' setup is inherently unstable. For example when loud bass notes are struck during a loud volume test the bottom bass can abruptly disappear; either getting muffled or vanishing entirely. This is due both to beads bouncing in the cartwheels, and the cartwheels themselves getting shoved out of focus by sound waves. The related problem is the one caused by the environment. Now that sonic patterns in the sound stream have been structurally identified by rosette imagery, focusing in the sound stream has led to the entire room becoming sound sensitive. To wit, every object in the room now audibly contributes or destroys effective sound. Specifically, by slowly moving any object around, it is now easy to hear where a room object snuffs or boosts the sound. This includes objects such as books, chairs, ornamental objects on shelves, whatever. It means that when anything is dropped on a table, or moved, that some good sound can disappear unnoticed. For instance the daily newspaper on the floor beside a chair will do it, snuff some sound. ATTEMPTED SOLUTIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- To get around this inherent instability in the 'EXPERIMENT', attempts have been made in the last few days to try to pin down the bottom bass range as much as possible by four main methods. 1. To go around the room (environment) sound tuning every object that is not likely to get moved or disturbed. This includes ornamental objects on shelve and whatever. This has been successful to a point, there has been slight stable amplification overall in the bass range but still does not get to the point of stablizing the bottom bass range. (We're talking about loud volume tests). 2. During sound tests, turning off all devices and appliances which have blowers. This includes fans, ceramic heater, computer, everything. It turns out (now) that blower fans can cause a standing wave which is toneless and slightly unpleasant or even uncomfortable to the ears. It is more of a pressure than an actual sound, but is not there when all blowers are off. 3. Fussing and fuming like heck over the display area of the table itself seeking more hot spots for placing beads, hats, and pineapples. All of the original pineapples have been pulled out and only a few are now being used, all in new locations. Also, the pineapples have been modified, consisting only of a 12mm cartwheel then an 18mm cartwheel topped by a bead, instead of being topped with a second 12mm cartwheel. 4. Placing several more pineapples in remote areas of the room. For instance two are on the TV set kitty corner at the back of the living room area. Also, on the book shelf against the dining room wall immediately opposite the table, over a dozen pineapples have been stationed on the shelf surface cleared of all other miscellaneous objects. Pineapples have been stationed at two corners lower down near the floor on this book shelf, and three pineapples are on objects which have all along been under the table itself. RESULTS ------------------------------------------------------------- All of these measures have been successfull, to a point. The problem is still in not being able to reliably pin down the bottom bass range. Let me explain what this bottom bass range is. At the moment I can only hear it on a tape entitled 'The Very Best Of Cream'. This band (if you do not know) is one of the more famous psychedelic bands of the sixties and early seventies. It features guitarist Eric Clampton on some tracks, but in particular has a drummer named Ginger Baker whose main claim to fame was in pounding the hell out of a giant drum set with huge tom toms and two bass drums which he played back and forth using both feet as part of the rythm structure. At the same time (on several cuts) the bass player sustained huge volume roars of electric bass using the lowest notes of the instrument. Now THAT is bottom bass, in total. The band itself was not known for its fidelity so there is otherwise intrinsic distortion in their music. I am lucky to have the tape because of the bottom bass potential. I'm unlucky in that it is the only tape I have which can produce the alledged bottom bass for most of the whole of the tape. Which introduces the main problem. I can have the bottom bass strongly in place and switch to another tape. Shortly after, switching back to the Cream, there is no bottom bass. In other words it now seems I cannot generically tune a handful of tapes for best steady state fidelity without also being able to hear the alledged bottom bass and keep it in focus. Don't forget, this famous bottom bass is being produced through two five inch paper cone speakers as the only sound source along with four 1 inch metal tweeters. The point is, that at times, during tests with the Cream tape, the bottom bass has abruptly moved in, seemingly from nowhere. That's how I first discovered it. First it wasn't there. And suddenly there it was. Booming away. So now in tuning tests a phenomena occurs. Suddenly you can hear open TONE in the bass drums of Ginger Baker, not just tone but you can hear the actual sound difference between the two bass drums, as their sound echos and reverberates as if you were standing close to the drummer. Believe me this is very different than a loud thud thud thud which is otherwise characteristic of drums in such music. Trouble is, this bottom bass can disappear just as fast as it appears, with no telltale or definative event having occurred to cause it to vanish. For instance at one moment the bottom bass can be tuned in or out by slightly rotating one of the pineapples on top of the book shelf. But a half hour later tuning this object has no effect and the bottom bass may get tuned in by adjusting another pineapple or hat on the table or somewhere else. CURRENT STATUS ------------------------------------------------------------- It looks like the end of the 'EXPERIMENT' is fast approaching. It seems probable that further efforts may be futile in the overall until more suitable sonic snowflake related objects are found to substitute for the beads and cartwheels now in use. Perhaps something to try in the meantime is to find some means of being able to file the cartwheels into a more definative six sided shape around the circumpherences of the six fans of each cartwheel. That is, if I continue this 'EXPERIMENT' beyond the seeming impasse of the phantom bottom bass. As already said earlier the cartwheels can be filed further, in that they consist of six circular blades, with three facets already filed on each blade using an ordinary household file. Two more facets could be filed using something like a motocraft hand held hobby grinder such as used in the jewellry trade, or perhaps with emery boards, neither of which I have. At the moment the intention is to go for the big one, to try whatever might work to try and pin down the bottom bass with more stability and to heck with high end fidelity or imaging for the moment. Who knows what might result, but I have no great expectations. FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE 10: November 27, 1991. (Evening) -------------------------------------------- The 'EXPERIMENT' has been dissolved. By sweeping a hand across the table and scooping up rosettes the 'EXPERIMENT' ceased to exist. This was not in impulse fueled by outrage, just, instead, an increasing reluctance to finally accept an end point to what was currently going on. At the end something was becoming increasingly apparent. I could get the bottom bass to come in, but then it would disappear and there seemed to be no specific variable causing this, other than that beads moved and rosette objects shifted in the sound stream causing the ultra fine tuned focusing necessary for the bottom bass to vanish. Once again I want to re-iterate just what this so-called 'bottom bass' entailed. It was Ginger Baker banging away on the double bass drums at full psychedelic frensy and power at very loud volume (45% volume) with the electric bass also roaring away majestically, in a very small room in a low rental condo using only two small cabinetes from a Fisher 8400 getto blaster as the sound source. 45% volume might seem low to people with disco amps, but this was more than enough to drown out the ringing telephone, and meant conversations took place as loud shouts with people standing close to each other. The moment the first swipe was made clearing away rosettes the bass of course vanished and what bass there was rattled the speakers even at ordinary volume. LAST MINUTE COMMENT ------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE 11: November 27, 1991. (Evening) ------------------------------------------- In the final moments of the 'EXPERIMENT' before the wipe, the Spitfire Band playing swing music could be heard with fidelity and range approximating live sound albeit of a band playing live in a room with poor accoustics. One of the things I now deem destructive to live sound performance is the trend of recording studios to superimpose a musician recorded in an isolation booth over the top of other musicians recorded in a more open space. This is akin to trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, in that the two parts of the sound being superimposed were recorded separately and so did not resonate together in a natural setting. Nonetheless the rosettes and beads allowed for some leeway leading to a better balanced stereo imaging in the reproduction, as if, for instance, a real live trumpet player stood up to play and practice to music coming from a living room stereo set at home. Toward the tail end of the 'EXPERIMENT' all objects had been removed a long way from the front portals of both speakers. Originally, tucking things right in tight around the edges of the speaker boxes seemed to have imparted some positive effects but gradually it became obvious that ANYTHING near the drivers of the speakers became major spoilers. In further modification, all seeming straight line images had been removed, in that some were found to incorporate three equal spaced extensions of nearby rosettes and others were found to belong to side arms of a twelve sided star. In any case, there were no straight lines of any kind in use that were external to (not a part of) a rosette. A final observation was that some inherent stability had been achieved in that no objects were being shoved aside right out of position in a rosette. In other words hats and pineapples had stopped skating around on the table. And definately no beads were taking off hopping through the air from one place to another. On the other hand there was still the problem of beads standing up at once in a number of hats to become spoilers, and hats vibrating enough to destroy the ultra fine tuned position of them. And now, with most of the rosettes dissolved, the getto blaster is going back to the expectations of such a device. For instance all of the sound range is weak and irritatingly distorted, and there is no sonic resonance at all in anything resembling bass. And in particular there is now less gain with the volume. For instance set at 20% for the FM radio there is less volume gain than with the volume set at 12% for the FM radio when all of the rosettes were in place. The reason why the 'EXPERIMENT' was dissolved is because I have to get on with other things and need the table space. Two rosettes and a handfull of beads and hats have been left in place along the back of the table and alongside the speakers to give some audio for listening to background music. The hats and pineapples festooning the book shelf on the opposite wall and elsewhere in the room have also been left in place. These provide a passable background sound for music. This was the purpose of the experiment in the first place - to come up with something half decent to listen to as background music, while hard at work on brain straining computer software projects. This simple goal is what inexorably expanded into the determination, then demonstration, and proof that fractal/snowflake principles based on faceted phase polarities inherent in hexagonal six sided - twelve sided images and stars, underly the propigation of sound. In fact a most noticable effect (with the getto blaster restored part way back to normal) is that cymbols now sound like the tinny things found on windup toys or kiddy drum sets with tiny metal cymbols. There is utterly no authentic sound to the cymbals at all, at this moment, on the FM. And you should hear the strange sour high pitched noise called ABBA (a rock band). In sum total, the effects in phase tuning the sound stream by principles inherent in the rosettes have been truely amazing. Greydon Moore. Ottawa, Ontario, November 27, 1991. POSTSCRIPT ------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE 12: November 27, 1991. (Evening) ------------------------------------------- This 'EXPERIMENT' was aided in part by Cliff S. Livingstone, who earlier learned about certain properties in sound now discerned by the above 'EXPERIMENT'. This was via tests conducted privately in 1977, and 1982 through 1986. In particular the fact that ultra fine tuning of bass effect sounds could be achieved by objects no larger than the head of a pin and that speakers could be majestically tuned to a room's live sound environment were made obvious back then. Those researches led to an intuitive picture of sound as a steady state moire pattern of such nature that disturbing one small point in the pattern could result in a ripple effect spreading through the whole of the moire pattern as the effect caused by the finger recurrs in other hot spots of similar characteristics recurring thoughout the moire pattern in the room. Mr. Livingstone suggested the analogy of sticking a finger in a trojan point and seeing all of the planets gravitationally adjust accordingly. The above 'EXPERIMENT' collaborates the moire pattern effect with the proviso that such a moire does not twist and contort as by stretching the rubber of a balloon or in a matter similar to the raisin in the bread concept used to picture the expanding universe theory - two raisins grow further apart the farther the raisins fly from an observer inside the swelling loaf of bread, even thought the raisons stay the same size, according to modern universal big bang red shifting concepts. In the first place the moire pattern for sound is principled in fundamental faceted six sided hexagon and Star of David polarities rather than concentric rings re-enforcing and interferring. The above 'EXPERIMENT' collaborates this moire pattern as one which recurrs, with for instance two points (raisins) within a moire recurring at the same distance apart regardless of the distance away from the sound source or an observer. This picture can be percieved as not only intrinsic in sound, it is similarly intrinsic throughout creation and Cosmic Law and in fundamentally involved in the existence of higher dimensional realities and the ongoing eternal realm of heavenly beings and civilizations of which the world is a part. --------------------------------------------- FINISHED --------------------------------------------- Sound1.txt ========================================= NEW SOUND EXPERIMENTS +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ by: Greydon Moore. December 7 - December 15, 1991. Resumed: January 3 - June 15, 1992. ------------------------------------------------------- This can be an experiment in the fast lanes for anyone curious enough to give sonic mass tuning objects a tryout, but who are not invested with time nor facilities sufficient to do full scale sonic research. The result for such individuals would be enough to demonstrate that a principle is indeed in evidence, but not to the extent of achieving a major change to pure high fidelity. (Later remark: - change that opening statement. If you choose to follow test steps, and experiments outlined in the following, you can discover how to obtain a stereophonic sound from a Mono system only, using a single speaker with a single Mono track for the sound source. This nice Mono stereophonic will be more than adequately fidelic for both background listening and at higher volume for hi fi listening). ------------------------------------------------------- This is another new experiment, comprising several tests to check assumptions and variables that were not addressed in the original sound enhancing test described in files SOUND.1 As was used in the first experiment an inexpensive Getto Blaster stereo system is used for the source of the sound and all test are conducted using only recorded cassette tapes of various quality, or the FM radio. The Getto Blaster is Model 8400 by Fisher. ------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- INTENT............ -------------------------------------------------------------------- PLACING OF A HANDFUL OF TUNING OBJECTS (SEVERAL DOZENS) (CALLED SNOWFLAKES) IN SONIC HOT SPOTS AROUND THE ROOM, AND FOCUSING EVERY SNOWFLAKE TO A POINT OF CENTER SPECIFICALLY BETWEEN AND WELL BEHIND TWO SMALL SPEAKER BOXES SITTING ON A LARGE TABLE, CAN RESULT IN A SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA MADE TO SONICALLY APPEAR AS IF IN FULL SIZE ON A CONCERT STAGE SPREAD OUT SIDEWAYS AND INTO THE DEPTHS BEHIND AN OTHERWISE FLAT WALL BEHIND THE SPEAKERS. THE FOLLOWING IS A DESCRIPTION OF EXPERIMENTS IN WHICH SEVERAL VARIABLES IN THE KINDS OF OBJECTS USED AS SOUND TUNING FOCUSER DEVICES, AS WELL AS THEIR LOCATIONS AND WAY OF POSITIONING, WERE TRIED WITH NOTABLE RESULTS. THE CONCLUDING DOCUMENT 'SOUND6.TXT' CONTAINS SEVERAL LAST MINUTE REPORTS AND COMMENTS, PLUS UPDATES, REGARDING TEST SUBJECTS DESCRIBED IN DETAILS DOCUMENTED IN SOUND1.TXT TO SOUND5.TXT. SO THUS 'SOUND6.TXT' CAN BE READ (WITH A WIDE OPEN MIND) AS A GENERAL REVIEW OF EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS. -------------------------------------------------------------------- OPTIONS FOR THE 'NEW EXPERIEMENT' - Circ. mid December 1991. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Formerly, an 'EXPERIMENT' was done with rosettes and bead objects only spread out on the 'table' used for the experiment, with no tuning objects anywhere else in the room. In this new Experiment, 86 sound framing objects are currently in use. This number is arbitrary and has varied up to 94 objects with as few as 64 during some of the tests whose descriptions follow below. In the original experiment, over 300 hundred sound framing objects were in use. 2. In another major change a handful of objects are now placed around the whole main floor area; including one at the North wall; two in the North-West corner on top of and underneath the TV set; Three by the South wall in the living area; one at the South wall in the dining area; and seven on top of a bookshelf (and three on lower shelves) against the West wall in the dining area opposite the table. Three more were tried then eventually removed from under the table itself at the East wall in the dining area. All of the external objects are either quite a bit higher or lower than the plane of the table top and the speakers. In other words, additional sonically re-enforcing hexagonally shaped mass objects have been placed here and there around the perifery of the whole listening area, in locations conducive to Up/Down polarity phasing effects as well as East/West and North/South. A couple of hundred 3mm beads in the original experiment used in particular to create Star of David images have been removed. In these new tests no such star images are involved. And six sided hexagon arrays called 'rosettes' have been reduced from 13 to only 2. NEW EXPERIMENT 1 ------------------------------------------------------------- I find I can tune in a reasonable fidelity with the DBE (Dynamic Bass Expander) button Off, which, as before in the first experiment, instantly increases both the high end and lower bass range in the sound stream when On. However there is a slightly detached echoing effect which seems to be intrinsic with the DBE ON, and in the overall the sound seems more fidelic with the DBE OFF, except for some loss of strength (or power) at both the lower and higher ranges of the music overall. Another effect, associated with use of only snowflakes (no beads) as sound framing objects, is there is a further loss of power in both the upper high end and lower bass end of the sound. You can hear both those ranges, but weaker, not anywhere as strong as in the case of the first experiment. (A snowflake is a six sided snowflake-like ornimental bead called a 'cartwheel' of either 12mm or 18mm size and sold in hobby or craft stores packaged under the name 'cartwheels'. In these tests, each 'snowflake' has been hand filed to further refine its intrinsic six sided nature. These filed versions are what are called 'snowflakes' in the following). A third effect is that at times the gain for the volume level I am using is lower than in the first experiment. It seems that very high volume tests can't be handled in this new situation, in that the sound after a certain crank of the volume can begin to compress into a pressure in the room itself and the sonics begins to snuff out as the sense of pressure increases. In fact the whole of the live presence can disappear, leaving big holes where stuff used to be. Instead is a standing steady racket comprising many frequencies horking at once, something like very bad disco music in an even worse Disco. In the new Experiment, I have been mostly using the volume set to about 25% to 35% (whereas in the first experiment the volume was set at ranges from 30% to around 50%. However, this does not mean there is less volume. In fact it seems that now there can be as much volume in the overall in this experiment with the volume set at only 25%, due to the sheer amount of information now being heard, even though the volume level of a given instrument playing at a place on a given tape may be less than in the original experiment, all things concidered. QUESTIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------ QUESTION 1 How wide across is a symphony orchestra during a live recording session on a concert stage, or in a studio? ------------------------------------------------------------------ ANSWER Probably at least TWICE the width of a long rear wall of a low rental condo unit. PROBLEM Stereo sound (typically such as it is) tends to be squeezed in a narrow area roughly six feet across between two speakers. ------------------------------------------------------------------ QUESTION 2 How far are the instruments from the microphones? ------------------------------------------------------------------ ANSWER This depends on the recording techniques but if a symphony orchestra being recorded live, suspect that the microphones can be anywhere from a foot to 30 feet or more from an instrument. PROBLEM How can the position of the microphones contribute to the reproduction of sound if the stereo system produces merely a 'cycloramic' effect with left to right separation between the speakers and no depth behind the wall? --------------------------------------------------------------- SOLUTION --------------------------------------------------------------- Both QUESTIONS 1 and 2 can be answered if some means is available to focus all of the sound's polarity factors, such that a symphany orchestra can be re-created in the sound image of it, both beyond the Left-Right bounds of the speakers, and well back behind the wall against which a pair of small speakers may sit upon a table. Such a solution has been met in this new experiment now herein being described, which is an extrapolation of the original experiment (described in files SOUND1.TXT in which major modifications have now been made in the nature of the sound tuning mass objects, their locations, and in their numbers. Their number was reduced from hundreds as used in the original experiment to (at the moment) only 86 sound tuning six-sided objects called 'snowflakes', 26 of which are currently placed in locations around the whole room far away from the table or the vacinity of the speakers. One 12mm snowflake sits on top near the front of the left side of the control consul. During the course of several tests, the number of snowflakes varied up to 94 in total, with up to 35 in various locations around the room far removed from the table which supports the sound source (Fisher Model 8400 Getto Blaster). At first all of the snowflakes were laid flat, but in later stages all of the snowflakes were stood on edge to stand vertically upright. The upright position changed the sound in a noticable way but seemed to diminish an overall great width noticed in the sound stream when the snowflakes were lying flat. I concider the possibility that the faceting angles of the snowflakes lying flat were able to factor into the depths and spreads of the sound image. IMAGING TESTS ------------------------------------------------------------- The following describes an effect when playing a casette tape of George Gershwin's 'An American In Paris', by the American Radio Symphony Orchestra, H. Brown, Conductor, and marketed by Allegro, ACS 8034. The effect occurred when all of the snowflakes were lying flat on their sides. Concider the sound of a flute in George Gershwin's 'American In Paris' heard being played out there in the snow, out by the sidewalk and far to the right, way out there far beyond the end of my patio fence, outside my condo windows. True. When this effect occurred I thought some kid was making a sudden loud noise out there in the compound. Looking out to see who was out there I realized it was a flute just kicked in very loudly, played on the right side of the symphony orchestra by someone at the end of one of the rows of musicians in the orchestra. Was I surprised? Yes. Such far off imaging was completely unexpected. What to concider is that, now, getting sound images relocating far behind the windows, so well spread out, so well back behind the speaker boxes, is now par for the course. All of the sound is now stably located back there. So North/South polarity and even an extended East/West polarity (spreading beyond the width of the room) is no longer a problem. Toward the end of the original Experiment (the first episode lasting 4 1/2 months where hundreds of filed six-sided objects of 3mm to 18mm size were used with all objects arrayed in rosettes and Stars of David, or in composite combinations of two or three objects stacked on each other sitting as singles on the table itself) one of the biggest challenges was to get the sound to move back from the table into a more realistic plane behind the windows. This was a touchy situation, with the sound moving back a bit then right back up to the speakers with just the tweek of a single bead or two. In this new Experiment, the main challenge is to achieve both high end and low end fidelity with no spitting or thumping of the speakers, or hot peaking (spiking) anywhere in the whole giant sound image, in other words minimum distortion everywhere in the sound range. This is easier said then done in fact it may not be possible to be really satisfied given the emnbodiment of the experiment as it now sits. In the meantime some relevant new facts have emerged from tests and trials in this current experiment. The fact is that now a stable giant sound image can issue forth from well back behind the windows and the wall, spreading from afar even well beyond the attached South/East corner of the wall. This is now more or less a constant in terms of imaging. The stability was achieved by pinning down a particular 'variable' so as to be able to fine tune the snowflakes in a specific way. The specific way and the 'variable' are as follows: This focused sound simply does not move forward to sit over the speakers and it seems that it cannot, with a uniform principle behind the focusing of the snowflakes from all various locations in the room. This is to focus each snowflake directly to an assumed central sound area which is both between the speakers but also well behind the windows. This means to point (focus) each snowflake to somewhere around 25 feet behind the window, to an imaginary distant focal out there, by rotating each snowflake on the spot where it sits. Fourteen 18mm cartwheels (herein called snowflakes) have remained composed in two rosettes, with all 7 snowflakes in each rosette focused to the point of center behind the window. Other snowflakes are all singles sitting by themselves around the room and uniformly focused no matter their location, to the point of center behind the windows. SEVERAL VARIABLES WERE LEARNED --------------------------------------------- 1. During several tests a variation in the type of tuning object was tried. This time a single design is constant for all of the snowflake objects in use. The design uses a basic 18mm cartwheel bead and 12mm cartwheel bead, all filed in a certain way, herein called 'snowflakes'. Three differences in the way the cartwheels can be filed were tried with noticable good and bad results in the way the filings effected sound. (Snowflake is not meant to connotate some mighty principle to be acknowledged. It is simply that in thinking of the objects, the word 'snowflake' comes most easily to mind). The shape in which these snowlakes were filed is described in detail further below, since certain variables in the way the snowflakes can be filed were found by certain tests (as already just said) to be significantly important. 2. Ultra fine tuning of the objects (you could in fact say a hyper fine tuning) over time leads to a recreation of something like listening to a symphony orchestra live with your eyes closed and opened. One of the noticable features is that grunting bass fiddles can be delayed by (it seems) a half a second or so for the sound to swell, rising up and spreading forth in the reverberations of the room. This is an honest effect. In fact symphony musicians are trained to play such instruments slightly in advance of the beat so as to allow time for the strongest part of the sound of each note to well up before becoming fully resonant so as to be in suitable synch with the rest of the orchestra. This delayed grunt was observed when only 18mm snowflakes were in use throughout and all were lying down flat. Later, when 12mm snowflakes were incorportated and all objects were standing on edge, the delayed bass grunt was not so evident due to the fact that it seemed not to be possible to tune in the same tonal depth or power in the range of bass sounds. (On the other hand, in later tests with the snowflakes standing upright, a greater sense of being there in front of the orchestra was apparent, even if pure fidelity was a problem with the total sound). Another noticable feature of the hyper fine tuning is that sound reverberations rustle around the whole body of yourself rather than impacting as hard knocks against the center of the chest area, or as an offbalanced effect in one or another ear causing an automatic tilt of the head for a better listen or to veer away from a subliminal irritation common to speakers. The knock in the chest area and the need to tilt the ears away from irritation were both (at times) cleared right away, when the setup was tuned to hyper fine levels via focusing of the snowflakes. One of the most noticable new effects was that it is now possible to tune in the image of a symphony orchestra in terms of both major width and major depth, with an image width which could be said to be in excess of 25 feet wide to the right and another 25 feet to the left, and whatever length back to the rear of the recording studio or concert hall, wherein long distance echos and audience sounds such as coughs become prominent far to the rear, standing out noticably from the orchestra itself. And you could pinpoint the source of a musician turning a page. (This was most noticable when only 18mm snowflakes were in use and all were laid flat). Normally, such coughs and other noises would be assumed to be from off in the rear due to unique color characteristics in the sound itself, suggesting to the mind a far away source. In tests, that characteristic sound was opened up to become clearly due to the sonics of a far away point of origin, because you could also subliminally hear portions of the sound echoing back in from the sides as it moves forth to you. Not to mention things like the rustle of pages being turned here and there throughout the orchestra, as distinct standout pinpoints within the whole of the giant sound image area. Wait till you hear a late afternoon announcer on the Ottawa's newest and most modern high tech FM station, wherein you can hear such usually filtered adulterations as amplified saliva bubbles splicking, and shuffling of paper program notes under the mike, even the announcer's running shoes shuffling on the floor, all going on around the giant large round hole of a sound image comprising the announcer's giant voice behind the windows. I have never before heard such noise nuances (adulterations usually filtered out before coming over an FM radio station leaving just the voice itself which is normally supposedly person sized in terms of source). It seems I had worked around the station's high tech compressing of the voice mikes and got what the mike (a few inches from the announcer's mouth) actually hears. 3. At times in tests in this new experiment there has been no hiss at all; a profound silence! The word 'profound' is not used loosely here. It can be rather a suprise to suddenly become aware that there is not a sound between tracks on the tape, or between pauses in instrumentation when a track is playing. This absence of hiss was possible with the DBE OFF. But It comes and goes - it is silent, and after 15 minutes of fine tuning of the snowflakes there is some hiss, and 15 minutes later there is no hiss again. But for the most part there is some hiss audibly there. It is the profound silence that is so striking when it happens. This profound silence is independent of the recording or type of tape used. I first heard it on a cassette tape named THE GOLDEN PIANO 2, produced by 'Distribution Madacy Inc.' P.O Box 550, Town of Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada, H3P 3C7. When using it for hyper fine tuning tests, suddenly there was a profound silence - NO HISS. But 15 minutes later with the same tape there was quite a bit of hiss, then some minutes later no hiss again for a moment or two, then a bit of hiss was back in after some more tuning amongst the snowflakes. So clearly the kind of tape media itself is not the control for this. Achieving no hiss seems to have been by remarkable luck because no specific variable in either the way of tuning the snowflakes or in where to put them seemed to be directly related to cause and effect regards the hiss. At this moment it is not clear if the profound silence comes from tuning out some type of cross harmonic carrier frequency, electron caused, which normally supposedly causes such hiss. Or if the hiss vanishes in fine tuning sufficiently hyper fine to cancel out high (and/or low) frequency compressions in the front to back (and/or side to side, and/or up and down) image polarity factors of the music. If the sonic case, the so-called electronic hiss which can be tuned out by snowflakes (normally diminished by having DBE ON) is sonically caused - a lack of sufficient every/way polarity in the sound regeneration, rather than merely an effect of electrons piping around in the circuits. One observation which points to the hiss being sonic caused is that it never vanished in tests with the snowflakes all standing upright in a vertical position. It was obvious that the hiss could rise or diminish in obvious changes with the focusing of but one snowflake by very small iotas. But the hiss never vanished entirely. - Later insert: this is not true, in later experiments described in SOUND4.TXT and SOUND5.TXT hiss on both cassette tape sources and FM radio HISS was heard to appear then vanish completely. One variable regards the snowflakes during the no hiss era was that 3 of the 18mm snowflakes were positioned under the table itself placed roughly six and twelve inches above the floor. 18mm snowflakes were in use throughout the room. And all snowflakes were lying on their side. COMPOSITE OBJECT TESTS ------------------------------------------------------------- After crowing about some striking wide width and depth sonic effects now uncovered by this new experiment going backwards over the past week, it became a question of doing hard core tedious tests to try and pin down some variables in the overall quality of sound in terms of both highest to lowest frequencies, and, as well, the exact nature by which the snowflake cartwheels are filed for best home grown effect. Several things can be concluded for the moment as a result of such tests. A problem had become increasingly frustrating in that it was not seemingly possible to get the same high volume action that had occurred in the original experiment conducted from August through November, nor was it seemingly possible to get the same amount of power in the overall bass end of the sound. For instance the 'bottom bass' effect described at length during the original experiment was not now occuring, no matter how judisciously the objects (snowflakes) were being fine tuned. One change was suddenly uncovered, however, as already mentioned above and repeated as follows. In the original experiment all things worked best with the cartwheels lying flat on the table, with the six blades forming a hexagonal spray when viewed vertically looking down on them. Standing the cartwheels upright on edge seemed to have a detrimental effect. However, in the new experiment it was suddenly discovered that standing the snowflakes upright on edge produced an immediate improvement in the open air sonic tone of the sound stream, hence all of the snowflakes are now standing on edge (this ability to have fidelity when standing upright is probably due to a further way of filing each snowflake, to be described further below). In upright tests, the very wide and deeply distant aspects of the sound image were not as apparent, but there has been a noticable change more to the liking, in that a slight flat tone in the sound (not previously percieved through lack of any comparative reference), was eliminated. With this came an experimental whim, which was to stand a 12mm filed cartwheel upright within the upright arms of an 18mm cartwheel, which again produced a noticable strengthening of certain parts of the sound. In this, the 12mm cartwheel intrinsically was rotated by 90 degrees relative to the 18mm cartwheel supporting it such that the full face of an upright 12mm cartwheel was faced to the main sound image area behind the windows. COMPLICATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- This seemed like it would be an exciting new find but led to immediate complications, as follows: The first complication was in the failure of the 12mm snowflakes to stay exactly in place when standing upright perched on an upright 18mm snowflake. The barest minimum shift in the position of the upright 12mm snowflakes could hurt the sound. So it was decided to glue the 12mm snowflakes in place and for this was purchased a tube of Gell type Super Glue so the 12mm snowflakes could be positioned and stay in place a moment until the Super Glue gained a solid grip. A particularly strong sonic hot spot was chosen at the front edge of the table in front of the control consul for the gluing. Here, each 18mm snowflake was first focused sonically, then a 12mm snowflake with glue applied on two of its blades was placed into the upright arms of the 18mm snowflake and after focusing it was left a moment until the glue held. Then the composite mass object was positioned in one of the existing sonic hot spots already occupied by an upright snowflake (18mm cartwheel). To make a long story short, this did not work as expected. It turned out that the fine tuned focusing of the composite object at the same single sonic hot spot at the front of the table worked only for that location, and that putting a pre-tuned composite object elsewhere actually, collectively, inexorably, hurt the sound. Too bad. FILING TESTS ------------------------------------------------------------- It was decided that a whole new set of filed snowflakes was needed to test the concept of a composite tuning object further. This, er, concept, was further promoted by the fact that over half the snowflakes were now bonded to the 12mm snowflake and all had been fine tuned at the location of a single hot spot good for that hot spot only, so were no longer reliable. But this also provided an opportunity to test another assumption regarding the way in which the snowflakes themselves were being filed into hexagonal faceted geometry principles. At this moment all of the filing had been done by a sequence of steps, as follows. A cartwheel held between the thumb and forefinger was placed upright on a large household file and slid back and forth to jointly chisle straight line facets on the ends of two of the blades. The grip was rotated by one blade and the cartwheel chisled again. This was done for the six possible pairs of blades, resulting in an angled chisle with a sharp edge on the end of each blade, with the tiny chisled angles being 60 degrees. Next, the cartwheel (still held between thumb and forefinger) was laid nearly on its side and by eyeballing the angle, sliding the tilted blades singly one at a time to cut a flat (rather than chisled) facet sliced at 60 degrees from the front facet. The accuracy of the 60 degree rotation was limited by the accuracy of the eyeball. This took 12 filings in all, to cut the next two hexagonal facets into the blades. Two more hexagon facets for the blades were achieved by using a long thin file used for sharpening saws. This file has three equal sides in the form of a longtitudinal equalateral triangle and by placing the cartwheel on a table, hexagonal geometry facets could be filed on the inner side of each blade where it attaches to the center of the cartwheel. However, again the eyeball was required. If the filing was done vertically with an apex of its equalateral triangle pointing straight down, the resulting chisle would be of 30 degree slopes in the facets relative to the other already filed sides. So the trick was to tilt the file to achieve an eyeballed 60 degree angle in the chisling. A final touch-up was done by inserting the angle of the saw file between two open blades and lightly filing to reduce sharp bumps in the center mounds of the blades designed in the cartwheel's manufacturing. A SECOND FILED SET OF SNOWFLAKES ------------------------------------------------------------- At least, that is how a first set of snowflakes were filed, by eyeball. It was decided to try for an ultimate accuracy in filing a new set of snowflakes and this accuracy took place as follows: Two means of this final filing were tried. Mainly, laying the saw file vertically directly across the inner joints of two blades worked better in sonic results than by placing the file directly in the depression crossing the middle of the snowflake across the bead's center hole where the blades joint at the center of the cartwheel. In other words, rather than using the saw file for chisling between each three blades, the chisling was done between each two blades. As mentioned, this form of chisling (stradling two bladed) seemed to result in better overall fidelity in the way the filed snowflakes have sonic enhancing effect. Also, the file was held as close to a vertical alignment as possible by eyeball, resulting in 30 degree angles being cut into the facets. It is impossible to get the saw file into place near the center of the cartwheel to chisle totally flat edges and so double faceted edges had to be used. TRYING ANOTHER NEW KIND OF FACETING ------------------------------------------------------------- And so, a whole brand new batch of cartwheels was judisciously filed into snowflakes having all of the facets cut with chisled faced facets. A number of 12mm cartwheels were also so filed and when ready, a new test took place. This time, each 18mm snowflake was positioned upright in place in a hotspot first, before the 12mm filed snowflake was placed on top and bonded into place in location at the hot spot with Gell Super Glue. COMPLICATION ------------------------------------------------------------- Right away it became apparent that something was WRONG. After a dozen or so of these vertically stacked composite objects were in place it become obvious that the sound stream was definately hurting. It just quickly got pukier and pukier as each new composite object was put in place replacing an existing (old style) snowflake or composite object. TESTING THE NEW FACETS ------------------------------------------------------------- So the idea of the newly remade composite objects was abandoned and new 18mm snowflakes were filed to replace those ruined by the Crazy Glue. This time, the snowflakes were filed with as much accuracy as possible, with either saw file or cartwheel firmly held in place on a flat surface when possible. The result of this filing was a complete set of snowflakes which were all more or less uniformly accurate in terms of their filings and angles, but they were no longer accurately of pure hexagonal shape. This brings us up to the moment of a decision to try a new means of chisling part of the blades. Specifically, rather than trying to eyeball a 60 degree flat cut face on the edges of the blades adjoining the front of the blade, the saw file (equalateral triangle in longitudinal shape) was placed on the table and the snowflake, held upright and gripped with the fingers, was slid back and forth along the edge of the file so that a hexagonal geometry chisling intrinsically results. This new form of chisling also intrinsically resulted in a sharp central face, with two longtitudinally narrow facets, and a 120 angle at the apex of the sharply chisled cut. In particular, at the third chisling (where the blades join the center) there was the sharp shallow face moving up at 30 degree angles, and the second chislings (after doing the front face) were extra long, much longer than the radius of a true hexagram. Nevertheless, the inaccuracy of the hexagram (now merely a polygon) was made up for by the fact that very little eyeballing was needed to cut, thereby guaranteeing a uniform accuracy through all of the snowflakes. This time the intent was to use an entire new set of 18mm snowflakes with 12mm snowflakes glued on top. Curiousity was high to see what could result from this. As the snowflakes were replaced anew, it was more obvious than ever that something definately was now hurting the sound. Subtely, inexorably, as each new snowflake was put in place, the great open airiness and overall sweeping dimensionality of the sound was vanishing, as was much of the bass. No amount of fine tuning or hyper fine tuning seemed to be able to boost any of the great sonic effects already uncovered up to this point in prior tests in this experiment. All of the desirable effects seemed to be getting squeezed out somehow, and the sound stream was taking on a completely electronic type of coloration. But an intuitive curiosity kept a push on to continue with this test. THE 'ANOMALY' ------------------------------------------------------------- Then something of unusual notice occurred, an 'anomaly', and thus something of worth was observed, which takes a moment to explain. Two tapes, previously not worth playing in any tests due to extreme hardships in their fidelity, had changed in terms of how much could be coaxed out of them! A modern big band swing music tape purchased at a Zeller's Store (a competitor to K-Mart) simply didn't work when played on the getto blaster being used for this experiment. It was an unusual thing. First, the sound would come on, but within seconds snuffed out almost to nothing. Nothing meant no music, no volume, nothing but a weak noise that could hardly be recognized as music. It was really a strange effect and nothing immediately came to mind as to its cause except perhaps some form of so called digital enhancing, or super bad production of the retail tape. This is going back to last month (November). None of my other tapes did this but this tape did. It happens that the assistent manager of the same Zeller's store was a neighbor in the same low rental condo and popped in for a moment late one afternoon where I played the tape for her and her husband and both were puzzled by the fact that the tape (a more expensive one - not a bargain barrel selloff) was a dud. Thus the tape couldn't be used at all for sound tests. (The tape is: A Golden Hour Of SOUNDS OF THE BIG BANDS, (The Frank Barber Orchestra) 1990 Knight Records, KGHMC 124, made in England). That takes care of the history leading up to the following observations. With the newly filed set of 18mm snowflakes all in place standing upright around the room and with 12mm snowflakes glued vertically into the open arms of every one of them where they sat, and the good sonic effects having vanished, I decided to try anything and grabbed different tapes to try them out seeing if any could improve the state of the sound by tuning the snowflakes when playing different tapes. One tape (titled 'The Beattles Rock 'N' Roll Music (Volume 11) by Capital Records-EMI of Canada, L4V 182), which had always been something of a source of dismal noise, was now found to be become reasonably fidelic Beatle's music when the snowflakes (all standing upright and focused to a sonic point of center about 25 feet behind the window) were hyper focused with great care. I mean with GREAT care. This was the only time this noisy tape has been heard with any clarity, and even at that it was still a racket. I gave up on this tape and grabbing another stuck it on. It was the above mentioned Frank Barber's swing era big band music bought at Zeller's and already identified above as being a total dud that mysteriously snuffed out in seconds flat each time it was played. Only this time it didn't snuff, not in the slightest. I didn't recognize the music (never having been able to play this tape before), and so used it for even more descrete fine tuning, finding that it was possible to get a somewhat remarkable degree of acceptable fidelity from it, but still failing to get in a real strong big bass range in sound, and also failing to bring back the large dimensional effect of open air room sound which I knew existed having already heard it a couple of days earlier before trying the new styled glued together snowflakes. Nevertheless, because of its impressive fidely, I fussed and fumed over the tuning for more than two hours using this tape. Finally it dawned on me that this apparently fidelic music was the dud tape. From the moment I put it on it played without hesitation and in fact could be tuned via the snowflakes into one of the better acceptable levels of fidelity achieved thus far, even though the sound lacked the qualities of a real strong bass plus the open air (airframe) effect. On the other hand, my best tapes used over the previous months for tuning tests, all sounded lousy, now, no matter what I did to try and tune the music. This is the 'anomaly'. Two tapes previously unplayable; the Beatles because it has been nothing but high pitched squeezed noise had become playable, and the Frank Barber tape which had previously snuffed out the instant it was turned on, had become impressively fidelic. I can only surmize that the complete chisling into angle facets of all of the faces of the snowflake was causing this, in that all of each snowflake's facets were reflecting sound waves striking and scattering them in exact angles conducive to hexagonal geometry but that all facets doing the reflecting had a sharp edge, edges sharp enough to cut like a knife, and that the resultant shape of each blade definately did not simulate a true hexagram around the blade's circumpherence, in that some of the major angles were 30 degrees instead of 60 degrees. I have to assume that such chisling was causing too much cross harmonic interference in that no part of the snowflakes were able thus to reflect sound waves straight back toward the sound source whether it be from the speakers or from reflections off the walls and objects in the room. DISSOLVING THE 'ANOMALY' ------------------------------------------------------------- At this point I dissolved the test deeming it of no avail to proceed further with the newly filed set of snowflakes. I started replacing snowflakes with the older version (as originally filed with two of the edges of each blade being flat faced surfaces thus capable of direct rebound reflections, and the inner facets filed by eyeball to approximate 60 angle cuts). This had to be done willy nilly for those snowflakes were now in a tray in the kitchen so to heck with their originally falsely glued tuneup at specific locations, I just grabbed them one after the other as needed and used them. Some of the snowflakes were glued together and others were singles. The results were immediate. As each old snowflake was put in place and a new snowflake removed, the sound picked up charge with a jump, with more bass coming in, and the open room (airframe) effect spreading forth, so once again you could hear surround, a sense of sound on either side of you (subliminal echo effects) rather than the sound being all squeezed into a tightly confined area directly in front of you (except for the anomalous Franck Barber tape, and the Beatles). So right away it was learned that uniform sharp facet filing snuffed or hurt sound coming from good tapes, and conversely it unsnuffed strange sound coming from very badly reproduced or doctored bad tapes. Wherein a flat faced filing improves the sound of good tapes but can't handle certain kinds of recordings. A kind of Yin-Yang situation. Interesting. This is the kind of question that audio engineers and physicists may find challenging. FINAL TEST ------------------------------------------------------------- A final test was done simply to confirm some observations that a viable open air (airframe) live room sound was possible using mass objects containing fundamental hexagon geometry as tuning devices. The test had to succeed on the grounds that fidelity was reasonable enough to show that technology could be later further developed to produce astonishing effects (if it came to that). For this, snowflakes as originally cut were used throughout. This is with the second set of facets filed by eyeball to have flat faces, and the triangular shaped saw file held at an angle to approximate a 60 degree cut across each adjoining pair of two blades in the inner facets where the blades join to form the cartwheel. Each object was tested where it sat, in terms of whether that location was better with or without a 12mm snowflake glued atop the 18mm snowflake, with result that 48 composite objects with 12mm snowflakes already glued on top were used, and the rest of the snowflakes (46) were singles sitting here and there on the table and around the room. Two rosettes (six sided hexagrams with snowflakes set at six nodal points around the circumpherence plus one at the center of the image) were in place, one on the outer side of each speaker. All of the snowflakes in both rosettes were tuned (focused) toward the point of center of the sound about 25 feet behind the windows rather than rotated to align along the six axle radii of its hexagram rosette. The rosette sitting to the right of the right speaker box was composed of 12mm snowflakes since in tests done in a hurry the smaller snowflakes seemed to produce a better sound response for that particular location for that rosette. In a further change, 21 of the 12mm snowflakes rather then 18mm snowflakes were placed standing upright at locations where they seemed to boost the bass and high end with some better effect, which is the only reason they were used. The 12mm snowflakes otherwise seemed to cause problems with fidelity when tried by themselves. All this was done add hoc and in a hurry to get to the finish with one final series of tests to affirm basic principles. In a final concideration, the room was tuned once more. 'Tuning the room' means going around and shifting everything worth shifting including chairs, sofa, vase, pencils, the rasping files wherever they lay, alarm clock, boxes, phone, modem, computer keyboard, etc., etc., to gain some marginal boost in the overall bass range, since such room tuning does work as audiophile specialists well know. Used for this final test was a cassette tape called THE BEST OF THE MANHATTAN TRANSFER, which includes their version of Tuxedo Junction recorded live. (The Best of the Manhattan Transfer, Atlantic, XCS-19319). In this version of Tuxedo Junction, a very large audience vigorously claps along on the on-beat with the music, so hardly a better tape could be found for testing live sound sonic effects. To make a long story short the test succeeded and witnesses heard it before I shut off the Getto Blaster. What was heard was a powerful sound with extra subliminal sonics seeming to come from everywhere when you stood in front of the table, and the sound out front beyond the windows and wall was as if you were standing in some way both behind and in front of the band on stage. The audience's clapping was heard far out in space beyond the windows and was spread wide apart from side to side just as it would be in a large auditorium. The fidelity was not enough to tell if this was an auditorium or a colliseum with a circular audience out in front of the stage and wide open space behind the band. To me it sounded like perhaps being on the stage of a large theatre or auditorium with perhaps theatrical housing behind the band. One striking effect was a definate delayed echo in the clapping coming back from the audience as Tuxedo Junction was playing. Just as it is in a live performance, such clapping is typically delayed behind the beat when being heard by a band on stage, in that the band's sound goes to the audience, the audience responds, then the clapping propigates back to the band on stage. In this case it was the mikes on stage facing the band, (with the audience behind the mikes), that were picking up the intrinsically delayed clapping. Live performers know that such clapping is always (to the band) delayed behind the beat. In normal stereo play such a delay is not clearly heard as a delayed echo except by the allusion of echo via coloration. But here in this final test the clapping was clearly about 1/2 a step behind the beat of the music and echoing in strong soars back up to the bandstand. In this final test you could not hear the bass drum very loudly, which is a fault, because from the band's perspective in a live performance the bass drum can be very loud, far louder than the sound level heard by the audience even when mikes and amplification are used for the bass drum. Such extra volume was not heard at all in this test. Also, the cymbols of the drummer were not fidelic, being pissing and weak. But voices were very clear and distinctly separate in terms of separation in a row acoss the stage and definately further forward out there in front of the main amplifiers for the guitars, keyboard, and bass instrument. And the MC shouting approval at the end of Tuxedo Junction was a way up front, being recorded by an entirely different accustics since the MC was shouting away from the band's mikes behind him, with him standing far forward on the stage as he shouted toward the audience. Worth noting is that at one point during the final tuning, the sound was better through the doorway and around the corner in my kitchen as opposed to immediately out in front of the speakers, which means the sound was wrapping around corners. In the last stages, the best sound was heard in the usual place expected of stereo sets, with the listener standing mid way between the speakers and back from the table. In sum total this was an unmistakable demonstration which had a spark in terms of demonstrating future potentials thus the fundamental assumption that hexagonal geometry is absolute in the propigation of sound independent of the mere fact of sound waves per se. VIBRATING SNOWFLAKES - The Next Day ------------------------------------------------------------- One final comment needs to be emphasized. Until this afternoon I had no idea just how far into hyper fine tuning the term 'hyper fine tuning' meant. This afternoon I learned that just touching a snowflake could be enough to tune it. It happened this way: Playing with a John Handy cassette tape of a concert performed live at the Monterey Jazz Festival circ. 1965, this was a (quote) very poor quality tape, included as Number 6 in a volume of over 50 cassettes produced in Italy titled 'I GIGANTI DEL JAZZ' and bought at the K-Mart store for 79 cents. On this tape Don Thompson the Canadian bass player is playing double notes, and Canadian Terry Clark the drummer plays what amounts to a non-stop drum solo in the background for more than half the tape. The composition is called 'If Only We Knew'. The point is that because of the poor quality of this tape the drums are hardly more than weak toks and taps in the background and the sonorous resonances of the bass simply not heard. (I know about this music having had the original LP of the concert when released in 1966). I decided to give the tape a try, beginning on one side of the room and carefully adjusting the snowflakes one by one proceeding from the right side of the room and table toward the left. By the time I got to the left side of the table there was some tone in the drums, for the first time after four months of occasionally trying this tape, and of course sonorics in the standup bass played by Don Thompson. (I should mention that once upon a time I worked with Thompson for a year playing gigs as a drummer before he joined John Handy, way back then, in fact, before Thompson began to play the bass and this happened because there were afternoon jam sessions taking place in a downtown club with Thompson playing piano but often no bass player around so Thompson the natural born musician began to pluck away on the bass to where within a few months he was working professionally as a bass player. But enough of this, it is not important). What happened this afternoon is that by the time I got to the left side of the table in fine tuning the snowflakes, all I had to do was TOUCH a snowflake to get a change in sound for the better. No more twisting left or right by 5 or 10 degrees, no more sliding the snowflake around in a small area. All I had to do was TOUCH the snowflake. I'll say this phrase again; "this is easier than it sounds". The main problem has been that static electricity can cause a snowflake to stick to the fingertips, so that after fussing and fuming for moments, when pulling the hand away the snowflake is pulled right out of position clung to the fingertips. Very annoying tendency. The solution to this is to spread a bit of liquid honey on a piece of paper and dip two ends of the snowflake into the honey before standing it in place at a sonic hot spot. This works mainly to the fact that the snowflakes tend to stick in place rather than to the fingertips so that fine tuning takes place very much faster than before. Besides, the snowflakes slide around very easily on the honey making it easier by far to find exact focuses for them. And they don't get knocked around on their own once in place. And so at the same time that it became obvious that really fine tuning was taking place merely by a touch on the snowflake, enough to move it by who knows how small an iota, it also became apparent that some of the snowflakes had begun to vibrate in a very strong way as mass stationary objects. At this point I switched to an Amhad Jamal trio tape featuring him banging the hell out of the lower octaves of a grand piano and the accoustic bass player banging just as hard. Now this tape is TOUGH on this getto blaster, the speakers have almost always rattled to some degree when trying to play that bass fiddle). Not this time. No rattle. And as touch tuning progressed the snowflakes started to vibrate. Vibration was strong enough it couldn't be damped by squeezing the snowflake between the fingers, the snowflake could still be felt to be vibrating, you might say, powerfully. I assume from this that really accurate tuning may not in fact be in effect until the snowflakes begin to strongly vibrate. But that is an observed assumption, a premise, not a contention which can be tested within the scope of this amateur home experiment. I can also assume that the mere touch of a snowflake is valid in that a touch can alter the angle at which the snowflake stands upright in a minuscule way, yet enough for the snowflake's chisled faceting to sternly re-align in the hexagonal and Star of David (snowflake-like) moire pattern set up by all of the combined resonances in the room. And for the question as to whether secondary resonances (those effecting solid objects such as the table itself) the answer seems to be yes, in that if I grip the table, which is now vibrating quite strongly, some of the best sonics snuff out. Finished. Greydon Moore. Ottawa, Ontario, December 17, 1991. NEXT FILE..........SOUND2.TXT