Musical Charge

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Royal
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Musical Charge

Post by Royal » Tue Jan 08, 2013 11:05 pm

It is no secret that music commands a significant amount of psychological control over sports.

Six notes on an organ are all it takes to get thousands of fans to yell “charge.” A few bars from the right pump-up jam can energize an entire stadium and resuscitate a team’s mediocre performance.

But a new book called "Inside Sport Psychology" by Costas Karageorghis and Peter Terry claims that listening to the right music can boost an athlete’s performance by up to 15 percent, equating it with a legal performance-enhancing drug.

While elite athletes usually are categorized as associators, meaning they find motivation inwardly, the rest of us are more likely to classify as dissociators, which means some sort of external stimulus is often needed to help kick into high gear.

This should debunk any long-held myths about the "Chicken Dance" and its influence (or lack thereof) on one’s ability to acclimate to a rapidly accelerating cadence. You may have thought you were totally killin’ it at your cousin’s wedding last summer, but the "Chicken Dance" was killin’ it for you. You are nothing.

http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/sounds ... r-athletes

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Pigeon
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Pigeon » Tue Jan 08, 2013 11:51 pm

Wonder how this plays into music soothes the savage beast. Maybe everything can be controlled with the right notes. I'm sure DARPA et al have figured this out.

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Royal
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Royal » Tue Jan 08, 2013 11:55 pm

A Dolphin's Sonar Abilities
Sonar refers to sound navigation ranging. It involves using and interpreting sounds to detect something's location underwater and is especially handy for two reasons: Bodies of water are often far too murky for sight, and sound actually travels quickly underwater, much faster than it does in air.
Sonar technology sends out sounds and waits for the sounds to bounce off other objects and come back (the same way an echo bounces back to us in a cave). This technology is called active sonar, as opposed to passive sonar, or simply listening for the noises of other active objects. Remarkably, with sonar, we can interpret vital information, such as exactly how far away enemy submarines are.

Unlike humans, however, dolphins have been using this skill, known as biosonar, for millennia. So they're pretty darn good at it. The tricks of sonar are built into their DNA, so much so that they can tell the difference between a BB gun pellet and a kernel of corn from 50 feet away [source: Gasperini]. A dolphin's sonar process, also used by bats and some whales, is called echolocation. If you've ever heard a dolphin, you'll immediately recognize its characteristic clicks and squeaks. But there's more than meets the ear: Many of the clicks are simply at frequencies too high for the human ear to detect. Essentially, dolphins use these clicks as active sonar mechanisms.

The dolphin's echolocation process goes like this:
1) The dolphin uses nasal passages to make a click and sends it through its forehead, which focuses the sounds together into a beam before sending it into the water.
2) When the sound hits an object in the water, it bounces back to the dolphin as an echo.
3) The dolphin absorbs this returning echo through its jaw.
4) A passage of fat from the jaw conducts the sound to the dolphin's inner ear, which exchanges nerve impulses with its brain to interpret the object's characteristics, such as size, shape and material.

One way to think about the echolocation process is to imagine you're in a pitch-black room with only a flickering flashlight to guide you. To help understand an object, a dolphin will move around and read it from multiple points of view, as you might in the dark room, as well as with varying kinds of clicks. They'll even adapt for noisy environments by adjusting the frequency of their clicks. Using this process, dolphins can determine the size and shape of objects and even, in some cases, distinguish different metals, such as brass and copper, from far away, which assists them in finding mines [source: Bechtel].
But scientists are not sure how a dolphin's brain interprets sonar information. So much of our human understanding relies on visual information that it's hard for us to wrap our brains around the idea of "seeing" particular objects with our ears. Because dolphins are so exceptionally good with sonar, studying them hopefully will help us improve our own sonar technology. Until then, however, we can certainly use the dolphins themselves to find dangerous underwater objects. Right?

Actually, some people question the ethics behind using dolphins for such purposes. On the next page, we'll investigate that side of the story.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoolog ... -mine1.htm

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Pigeon
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Pigeon » Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:09 am

The site should have dolphin sounds as it's theme music.

Pretty amazing to humans. Wonder if dolphins think that people are dumb. I bet they dislike the navy.

"These dolphin sounds are well within the hearing range of people. While echo location clicks can range up to about 150,000 Hz (about 8 times higher than the normal human hearing range), a lot of these clicks occur at frequencies as low as about 2,000 Hz. So people can easily hear them with the proper hydrophone (underwater microphone)."

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Pigeon
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Pigeon » Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:11 am

A short sound stream


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Pigeon
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Pigeon » Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:16 am

here are some sounds

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Royal
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Royal » Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:28 am

There is something magical about the DolphinSqueals.wav

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Pigeon
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Pigeon » Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:40 am

Can you imagine being a sonar operator in the navy. Might start thinking like a dolphin.

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Royal
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Royal » Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:48 am

Probably learns Dolphin and whale language in his spare time to eavesdrop. Not even the ocean is safe.
Last edited by Royal on Wed Jan 09, 2013 1:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Pigeon
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Re: Musical Charge

Post by Pigeon » Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:52 am

If the water mammals only knew...

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