Do they make headphones just to cancel noise and not to listen music?
All noise cancelling headphones will do this if you don't play music. In fact, some active noise cancelling headphones will make a feature of this and allow the headset to run without needing to connect the audio cable to the headset. For in-ear noise isolation earphones, again just insert them in your ear and don't play music - of course a cheaper option is just earplugs.
What kind of music do the most intelligent people listen to?
Typically smart people listen to music what appeals to their own taste, while stupid people listen to music which appeals to their group of reference. Smart people tend to be individualists while the lesser endowed of the cerebral performance tend to be herd souls.But there is a correlation - not causation - between IQ and musical taste; the higher one’s IQ is, the more he or she prefers complex melodies and lyrics, while the lower it is, the higher preference on rhythm. There is also a weird - really weird - correlation between latitude and musical preference: the closer one’s home is the Equator, the higher the preference of ‘light’ musical styles like reggae, soca or calypso, while the higher the latitude and closer to poles, the higher the preference of ‘dark’ musical styles like heavy metal. Unfortunately, latitude and IQ has also correlation: the average IQ tends to be the lowest on Equator and rise towards both poles, North and South.My own experience is that the most intelligent people tend to prefer classical music and prog metal. The reason is simple: classical music is extremely complex and full of all kinds of melodic and harmonic variations and decorations - and prog metal is today’s classical.Other “heavy” or “hard” styles, such as nerdcore, death metal, hero metal, experimental rock, progressive rock and art rock tend to be also popular amongst the highly intelligent. If someone likes Queen, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, David Bowie or Led Zeppelin, he or she is likely to be quite bright.Many highly intelligent are also into jazz, bepop, jazz rock and crossover styles.
Do people hear voices coming from their white noise sound machines?
Yes, and you can also see faces in random TV static. The human mind will find a pattern when none exists, or where even a fraction of a pattern is there.A note on the repetition part:Many white noise circuits use a pseudo random sequence generator, which seems to generate random numbers, but actually repeats a pretty long sequence (long in electronic terms). That sequence can be short in terms of the human audio system.Oh, and a shorter sequence will be slightly cheaper. So there is an incentive to make the sequence as short as it can be before people causally notice the white noise seems to repeat...Another thing about pseudo-random generators - they will generate all but one possible combination of digital words. A typical version will generate about 32,000 digital words. Some sequences of these digital words will result in something that sounds like part of a syllable. So you could easily have 50 or more syllable fragments in the actual sound, being repeated.This is roughly analogous to trying every possible combination on a combination lock.So yeah, white noise will sometimes sound like speech.There is another possibility, and that is a strong nearby transmitter (CB. police, amateur radio, pirate radio station, walkie-talkies, etc.) can interfere and you will hear distorted (or sometimes clear) voice come through. Radio operators often repeat phrases when there is communication difficulty.This occurs with all sorts of consumer radios. Older TV sets used to be able to hear the analog (AMPS) cell phones signals on the UHF bands. A strong signal will "break through" into many radios. You may have drive past a radio station that is near a road, and had the nearby station's signal override a different station you were listening to. (This would happen often when driving past the old KKHI station next to US 101 near San Carlos, California. It can still happen when driving near KGO - AM 810 KHz (50,000 watts) on the Dumbarton bridge causeway in Fremont, California.
What do you think Erik Satie meant when he said, "Music is the space in between the notes"?
I like that quote! Music is not just about creating sounds -- it's also about creating patterns of notes and beats. With beats silence is essential...there's no such thing as a continuous drum sound. (Even super-fast drumming requires tiny silences so you can make out the individual beats.)Some instruments -- including the human voice -- allow you to continuously modulate a sound's frequency. So you can imagine a piece of music involving a non-stop undulating sound. But that tends to get monotonous. Moving in discrete jumps adds some spice to the mix. And when you have jumps, you get to decide when to jump, when to stay put, and when to do nothing! :) Timing is everything.So the silences between notes are crucial. They give each note is separate identity, and can convey implicit rhythms. Have you heard of the concept of Figure and Ground?The figure is the part of the picture that is the main focus, and the ground is the background or framework. Each creates the other. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. Is the figure above a white vase, or two faces? In music the audible notes and beats are the figures, while the silences are the ground.
Why do bands/artists usually sound worse live than in the studio?
This is a Shure SM58 microphone:It’s the standard vocal mic for live performance, for several reasons:It’s cheap, about a hundred dollars.It’s rugged, verging on indestructible.It has a good polar pattern for stage work, with sensitivity falling off dramatically with distance, thus minimizing the amount of bleed you get from onstage sources like monitors and amps.The SM58 captures sound pretty well. However, it does not sound amazing.This a Neumann U47 microphone:It’s one of the most widely used vocal mics in recording studios because it has sensational accuracy, presence and clarity. However, it’s usually not a mic you want to bring with you to a club or on tour, because it’s very delicate, and quite expensive, in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars. Even if it were as cheap and rugged as an SM58, though, this would still not really be the right mic for a gig. It would pick up every bit of ambient noise in the room, including the amps and monitors, people talking, the cash register at the bar, the air conditioning, and so on. It only makes sense to use a mic like this in a pristine sonic environment like a professional recording studio.Sure, the recording studio is more forgiving than the stage in some ways - you can do many takes, you can rest between each one, and you have access to all the corrective technologies like EQ and compression and Auto-Tune. (Though you have EQ and compression and Auto-Tune onstage too!) In some ways, studio work is harder. We listen to recordings a lot more closely than live performances, and we listen to them over and over and over. A subtle imperfection that you’d never notice at a show will quickly start getting on your nerves on a recording. Anyway, the main reason that recordings sound better than live shows is the environment and the gear. No matter how good the performance venue’s acoustics and amplification are, you can always get better sound in the controlled and clinical environment of the studio.
What music genre is Pendulum(Drum and Bass)?Electro?
They're considered D&B for want of a better term, but very rock-influenced.
Sound Engineering: Why doesn't noise cancellation work in a live concert?
Short Answer- Not possible practically. TL;DR - Buying noise cancellation headphones for each resident might prove cheaper than creating it or it might happen that while cancelling out the sound you might end up cancelling all the music too, so in a way doesn't fulfil the need. Long Answer- Noise cancellation in layman terms is an electronic circuitry in an headphone which produces a noise cancelling wave which is 180° out of phase with the ambient noise. The wave acts as noise eraser by removing the background noise without diminishing the audio/music you are hearing. Why can't this concept be applied to live concert? The problem is that headphone sound is one-dimensional in a sense that the headphones is converging music from all directions into your ears. but in a live concert this gets more complex due to a 3D sound field as in that the sounds spreads across in all directions So big deal? Create a electronic circuit which can reproduce 3D sound field.Well, No. This isn't as easy as we thinkThere are 2 things to consider: To re-create 3D sound field we need to produce a perfectly spherical anti-wave which can cancel out the sound produced by the source Even if you create a anti-wave next question is where will you place the source so that it can perfectly cancel out each other without any interference as it might happen that the anti-wave might as well cancel out all the music and you end up in total silence ( It is analogous to fitting an elephant in a car, its possible but only if the car is just as big as elephant which would in itself defeat the purpose of a car)Why is it difficult to recreate 3D sound field? To reproduce 3D sound field (It is analogous to imagining hologram)you need an array of microphones, set of transducer to create 3D sound ( just as only if the car is as big as elephant and it doesn't exist as of now) and then you combine both in sync to produce acoustic field, which is just as difficult as it is to even visualise an elephant in a car. Is there a way we can achieve it? Yes. If the concert is in a closed room or a dome rather than OAT's or open ground than sound proofing by acoustic decoupling can serve the purpose. But for open ground it is not possible practically as of now.Info links: How do active noise-cancelling headphones work?