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engineering project - trance related
Im 4th year elec eng at u of t, and one of the classes im taking is called electroacoustics. Its pretty cool, you get to learn a lot about sound. The way certain types of sounds are produced, the frequency domain and harmonics and their effect, the way we hear, and the way we make certain sounds using our mouth, etc, etc,..
Anyways the lab component of our final grade requires us to do a project. A few of you know about this. My partner and I chose to do a research experiment about music and its effect on the human body. Basically, our hypothesis is that certain types of music (which we describe in technical nature) excite humans whereas others do not…our prof is really into the idea and some of the experimental results are done and I thought I would share.
In the first of a series of experiments, we measure the heart rate and blood pressure of a person in a rested state, and once a again a short time later while they are exposed to music. We let the subjects choose the music from our list of songs (songs that fit the description of our hypothesis). We included many types of genres and this is what we found.
Everyone’s heart rate was increased when they were listening to music, some more than others. Some people showed an increase of maybe 5 beats more/min, whereas others showed an increase of up to 28beats/min.
And guess what type of music showed the greatest increase in heart rate? That’s right, trance! And it wasn’t even for people that liked trance…. I had some people who hated electronic music in general do the experiment while listening to trance, and the same result, a big increase. I just did it again while listening to gouryella and my hr went up 17beats/min lol… keep in mind, no one is moving let alone dancing..
We really didn’t know what kinda results to expect, but this was a pretty big deal considering the numbers we were getting… ususally your heart rate increases when you start doin some physical activity, but this is measured when sitting down calm and quiet like they were during their first test.
I always figured you go to a club, hear some beats, start dancin cuz u like the music, and your body reacts… but really, your listening to the music, and it stimulates ur body as to make you want to dance by raising your hr, and hopfully a few other things (we’re not done the experiment)… pretty cool huh?
maybe some of you knew this, but I didn’t, and neither did the prof…
It’s a fun project, but its hard too, a lot of math, programming, and analysis of sound patterns. Just thought id share with you guys, I know from another thread that theres a lot of tota engineers. If anyone wants to be a part of it, and you go to u of t downtown, send me a msg =)
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