Mar 17 2025 - Noises Off

 

Noise and sound are similar.  The big difference is that noise is considered unwanted or unpleasant sound.  This has come to my attention recently with the loud music in the gym at the Y.  Music is an important component of exercise - it sets the tempo with the beats per minute.  Kenny, the Total Fit instructor was telling me all the BPMs for the various types of exercise - cycle fit, muscle fit, cardio, etc.   It is the loudness factor that has my attention.  That's where the sound heads into noise territory for me. So I got a decibel app to find out if things were really loud or if I had hearing sensitivities. The conclusion is that the sound is loud in the gym.  The app says that over 80 decibels is concerning. It got me thinking about all the kinds of sound there are - and let's just look at the sounds that the human body makes.  I found a picture chart for some of them.  Is drool a sound?   The article covers well over 100 of these sorts of things - it is HERE.   We can make a lot of sounds, so there's likely a subsequent chart for which are unpleasant. If drool is a sound, I vote that drool is unpleasant.

And then the human voice can produce 500 different consonant sounds and 200 vowel sounds.  Take English, it uses only 24 consonant themes and 15 vowel phonemes.   I seem to think that we take most of this for granted.  We have geared our education towards the thinking end of things and mostly ignore sound except for music. The Guinness Book of Records has the longest continuous held note (more than 2 minutes), the loudest scream, the lowest vocal note by a female.The loudest burp (109 decibels) compares to the loudest snore, which is not quite as loud at 93 decibels.   There we are again, back to measuring the decibels of sounds.

This is a HDR rendering - you can see the Photomatix imprint - I was trialling it yesterday after deciding that I would like more HDR images.  Some time ago Photomatix got lost from my Photoshop plugins with an upgrade. I was using another software plugin to do HDR type images.  But that plug in is now gone too, so Photomatix needs to get reinstalled.   The result is a happy engineer at Strasburg showcasing the grime on his overalls!   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca