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  • Hey there, I am Jake;

  • and you know what's amazing?

  • Magnets.

  • But we are not here to talk about magnets today.

  • Instead we are gonna talk about an instrument that we all have;

  • which is our throat

  • And then we are also gonna talk about ears,

  • which isn't really an instrument.

  • But let me show you this clip.

  • (Clip plays) (People singing)

  • That is called tuvan throat singing or

  • Khoomei,which is an ancient Mongolian technique of

  • singing two tones at the same time.

  • And we can do it too with the power of DONGS-

  • things you can Do Online Now Guys.

  • (Intro Music)

  • Pink Trombone was featured in a previous DONG,

  • but there is even more to talk about.

  • If we hit the pitch wobble button, it

  • will hold a single note.

  • If we right click anywhere, we can keep it from snapping back to its original shape.

  • So then we will make a little

  • cave with the tongue and use the front of the tongue to change the shape of the cave.

  • Bam! You're singing two notes!

  • But how does this actually work?

  • Well it comes down to how we pervieve and create tones.

  • Whenever we hear a tone we're hearing the main note.

  • Also called the fundamental.

  • And then a bunch of other notes on top of it called overtones.

  • Tones are the frequencies we hear

  • and notes are the same name we give to them, so this

  • [PITCH PLAYING] So this is a tone, but calling it a 'G' makes it a note.

  • Anyway, what these singers are doing is isolating the overtones with their tongue

  • and amplifying it with their lips

  • causing a two tone whistle now pudding.cool has a great visualizer on

  • overtones; the brighter a sound is the more overtones it has. Bright sounds are

  • things like a distorted electric guitar or a square wave or a raspy voice so

  • here we start with a sine wave and then we add the overtones on top and it gets

  • brighter and brighter. At first it sounds like real notes but as they get higher

  • and higher they just start to sound like buzz. The overtone series is why some

  • chords sound good together: they reinforce the harmonic series.

  • We can see this with the overtone generator website which lets you hear each relationship

  • between notes in the overtone series. Each bar changes the volume of a

  • multiple of the fundamental frequency. You can also see what different types of

  • waves look like, and what overtones each of them use.

  • Here's square, sawtooth, and a simplified version of a violin.

  • At the online tone generator we can check out alot of cool stuff with tones.

  • When you set it to one Hertz, do you hear the beat?

  • Now let's speed it up and it eventually becomes a note.

  • This means notes are just really fast beats, and beats are just really slow notes.

  • If we go back to the overtone generator we can see something interesting.

  • Any combination of notes can be thought of as a ratio

  • where each number represents the relative Hertz of each tone.

  • So this chord you're hearing has a relationship of 5/4.

  • Now remember that a tone we hear is just a really fast beat, so these two tones represent a poly-rhythm.

  • For every five beats of one there's four of the other

  • and that gives us a nice pretty major chord.

  • The thing is, our brains love simple math with small whole numbers.

  • As the numbers and the relationships get bigger and more complicated

  • they sound more and more dissonant and...kind of sour...off.

  • You can see this really clearly with the African polyrhythm generator.

  • This is essentially the same concept but slowed incredibly far down.

  • If you play the four beat and the five beat at the same time, well you're experiencing the same thing as a major third.

  • a nice happy note, a nice happy beat.

  • But if you bring the numbers up, it starts to sound a little crunchy.

  • You can also check out the page on binaural beats

  • which is an illusion that takes advantage of our brain's assumptions about what it's hearing

  • now, put on some headphones for this and play slightly different tones in each ear

  • and your brain will fill in the beat it assumes it should be hearing

  • So if we play a three hundred Hertz tone in one ear

  • and a three hundred one Hertz and the other, we will hear a pulse underneath it

  • At a rate of one Hertz; the difference between the two tones.

  • And if we go back to the regular tone generator and play that one Hertz beat again

  • it'll be about the same speed.

  • Normally when you hear two frequencies that are similar, but not exactly the same

  • the compressions of the air that cause the sound will cancel each other out

  • causing a beats and this is not an illusion it's actually how

  • sound and air compression work. This website also has a hearing test that

  • will sweep through all the hearable frequencies.

  • Normally the human ear can hear between 20 and 20,000 Hertz

  • but with age and damage to the sensory hairs in your inner ear

  • you may lose sensitivity to certain frequencies.

  • So let's turn up the volume

  • also Jack probably should have closed this tab...

  • that is inappropriate...

  • Alright so, we are going to play...

  • [PIANO MUSIC]

  • [PIANO MUSIC] What? Oh my gosh

  • you just have one hour of relaxing Zelda breath of the wild music on

  • [LAUGHING] Now I know what you listen to.

  • [LAUGHING] That really scared me

  • [RISING TONE]

  • Okay I can hear that.

  • Okay it's going up. We're hitting three thousand

  • Four thousand

  • Seven thousand. That's going to take a little while to get to twenty.

  • Eight thousand.

  • Can everyone still hear this?

  • [BACKROUND: Mh mhm] You sound so sad.

  • I feel like the dog is probably very upset.

  • Eleven thousand.

  • Twelve thousand.

  • I feel like I'm in one of those movies where the sonar is like

  • OH NO THEY'RE GETTING CLOSER!

  • Oh we're at fifteen. I can't hear it anymore.

  • Can you hear it? [BACKGROUND: Yea I can hear it]

  • We're now at seventeen.

  • Eighteen.

  • I can't hear anything. So I I dropped off at about fifteen thousand Hertz

  • the other folks in the room that aren't Jack or Jake were about

  • what seventeen thousand Hertz? What were you at? I wonder. But you know what let's

  • let's move to some a little bit more calming, with calming tones

  • this chill music maker has a bunch of ways to customize the sounds it makes.

  • You can choose the type of waves the tempo filters and effects.

  • Oh yea, I feel calmer already. Do we have any other calm music DONGS?

  • You bet your ding dong diddly we do.

  • At virtual halo player you can play around with a simulation of this space-y instrument

  • and a crazy amount of tunings.

  • [LAUGHING]

  • You just play with the numbers on your keyboard but just so you know, we don't just do

  • things online now guys here, no we don't. Barry White, do we?

  • Disinterested.

  • We also do things in real life now guys known as DIRLINGS

  • And also before we get into the DIRLING, if you want there's more DONGS

  • Right here in this playlist. That you can click. Next to my face. That's wonderful.

  • [TO THE SIDE] Barry White where are you going? He's so confused.

  • But now back to the DIRLING. Our wonderful VFX wizard and cinematographer here at Vsauce, Eric Langley,

  • is going to play a Halo drum that he loves very much

  • his name is Susan, is what he calls it he's playing an original song that he

  • wrote called doves fly through the air. And as always thanks for watching.

Hey there, I am Jake;

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