Our Very Own Musical Skeptacular

As a skeptic I love a good mystery - the kind of puzzle that Arthur C Clarke would write a book or make a TV show about. A couple of weeks ago I found a set of YouTube videos about a contrived mystery - one that's been deliberately created, rather than many of life's “mysteries” that come about because of misunderstanding and a lack of scientific understanding - or real mysteries where there's nothing otherworldly, but just a lack of information that would explain the backstory to a situation.

Music is an amazing phenomenon. It's something probably every neurotypical person feels connected to. You rarely hear someone say “I hate music” or “that person hates music” and, if you do, I suspect it's not really true. I think it's more likely that that person dislikes loud music, or being in a crowd listening to music, or certain types of music they've been over-subjected to. Perhaps even it could be that they had a bad, maybe humiliating experience related to music when they were young. There are many reasons I can think of that someone might say “I hate music”, and that not actually being true. Music isn't unique to humans either. Many birds are amazing singers. Only I suppose when a bird is singing it's most likely interpreted as “who wants to get laid?”...so… not much different to humans then. All this to say that being such a ubiquitous thing, so universal, and yet how it works is so poorly understood by so many, you know that sooner or later someone will invoke magic or spirituality to define it, and cash in on ignorance to sell something.

I was in JB HiFi the other day and noticed that vinyl records have made a comeback. There were rows and rows of new releases on vinyl LP, selling for between $50 and $60 a piece. It reminded me of an incident a few years ago, when a friend of mine moved from the US to New Zealand.

For every Bill Gothard who terrorises his followers into believing that music with a fast beat will bring them closer to the devil, there is a Sri Chinmoy who is driven to play music, albeit atonally, in order to get closer to god.

About 10 years ago a friend asked me about binaural beats. I had to admit at the time that I was oblivious, and had never heard of them. He proceeded to describe a fun audio effect, one that only works through a pair of headphones. If you play an audio tone (frequency) in each ear, and make the tone in each ear a little different, the difference between the frequencies of these two tones - their interference pattern - can be heard as a third audio tone that sounds like it's originating from somewhere between your ears. So, if you play a 550Hz tone in your left ear, and a 500Hz tone in your right ear, you will also “hear” a 50Hz tone between your ears: 550 - 500 = 50.

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time hanging around at my best friend's house. His family were committed Christians, and I was a young atheist. This was a time before I converted to Christianity, as a 17 year old, and I enjoyed arguing with Christians about the age of the earth, the fossil record, etc. It's weird that so many evangelical Christians hang their hat on the idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary that was so easy to grasp that even a clueless 15 year old like me could figure it out. Anyway, I digress…