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Electric Feather Music

Related to Pineapple Emotion Amplifier (link)
 
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Background: a year ago I happened to be shoving a pineapple into a disposal and I happened to turn the disposal off with the pineapple half in and half out of the disposal with its fronds sticking out of the drain at the bottom of the sink and there happened to be a tape recorder with bendy distorted guitar sounds on it that I had let run out of battery juice so that it just slowed down and gradually stopped playing and when I turned off the disposal I heard that the tape recorder had started back up and sounded like it was screaminmg in pain, and when I touched the fronds it sounded like I was yanking the vocal chords out of a dying man.

One amazing thing I forgot to mention in the linked pineapple emotion amplifyer idea was that later on that week I was experimenting around with the same tape player -- the one with the almost dead batteries -- and I decided to try one of those really fancy plumey ostrich tail or wing feathers that people use as pens at their weddings. When I held the feather up in the air and rested the root of it on the tape player, the sounds that came out were unbelievable. It sounded a lot like a huge piece of lightly crinkled tinfoil swaying gently in the wind, plugged into a distorted amplifyer with feedback. A truely unbelivable sound.

A third thing that happened was that I had recorded a periodically repeating series of sounds from a video game and was playing them on the recorder and I let it run out of juice and I put it on my stomach as I was lying down and it started back up again in time to my slow breathing, and every twitch I made no matter how small was reflected in the sound of the tape recorder.

Finally the other night I was going to sleep and it was uncharacteristically quiet and as I was drifting off to sleep I could hear that same type of sound - this time without a tape player around - and much clearer and more dynamic and quieter - the same as the feather and the breathing but amplifyed - in my ears and by playing around with making subtle movements all over my body I could tell that it was the sound of my whole nervous system doing that same feather-pinapple thing and i was thinking that the similarity must be that all of those things, a fruit, a feather, a body and a nervous system are all wound up electromagnetically some way and if you amplify them you can get great sounds number one but also you can hear subtlties that you never thought were there.

I guess there must be some kind of application here for biofeedback. Would someone who is better with electronics than I am and who has more time on their hands please take this and run with it?

JesusHChrist, Jun 19 2005

Pineapple emotion amplifyer Pineapple_20emotion_20amplifier
[JesusHChrist, Jun 19 2005]

Plant Music -- look 3/4 way down the page for "Stereofernic Orchidstra" http://soundplant.org/store/gallery/
Rare Plant Biofeedback Music. For anyone in the DC area, there is a talk on plant music being given at the Library of Congress Pickford Theater on July 25th at 7pm [JesusHChrist, Jul 19 2005]

[link]






       I didn't post on the original idea, but I'll post this now. I've got to believe we're talking about the same root cause.   

       I used to have an early model phase shifter, back in the 70s when such things were popular. This one was unusual in that it had a pedal attached to a potentiometer, which one would use to adjust the modulation on the fly. It would produce an effect almost but not quite exactly like a Leslie tone cabinet. It worked nicely with my 73 Rhodes.   

       I discovered quite by accident one day that by half-ways plugging in the quarter-inch phono jack, the device would produce sounds evocative of the slaughter of several emus with a dull axe. Another emu would die with every 'beat' of the device, and depressing the pedal would increase the death rate.
waugsqueke, Jun 20 2005
  

       -- and that's how you came about your bakename (waaughhssqeeeek! )
not_only_but_also, Jun 20 2005
  

       Hey! zeus: What are those sentences all about? You sort them out and I'll have a stab at the electronics-types answers. I'll need a couple more details before I can come up with a decent explanation but I reckon they'll come out if you just organise the idea...   

       [waugs]: The half in plug is not touching the socket and a spark is jumping across the air gap. The air gap is acting as a capacitor: voltage builds up to a level where the potential difference between contacts is enough to spark across. The more you press the pedal down, the higher the rate of voltage change and the more frequent the emu deaths.
Jinbish, Jun 20 2005
  

       [JHC]: I take it back - the explanations are all there in your Pineapple emotional amplifier idea.
Jinbish, Jun 20 2005
  

       //....and as I was drifting off to sleep....// I think we have the first inklings of an explanation here.
Basepair, Jun 20 2005
  

       [Base] Actually there may be a dietary consideration...
JesusHChrist, Jun 21 2005
  

       can I just run?
afrocelt, Jun 21 2005
  
      
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