Infrasound speaker size

Can normal computer speakers play actual infrasound? What about normal cell phone speakers Or, more precisely, how big would the speakers have to be to get low enough? And what about recording it?

The background: Cracked’s latest podcast had a brief bit of infrasound from this video, and I wondered if we can actually hear it. Even the guy at the end wondered if it was placebo.

Alternatively, do modern audio formats even keep infrasound data? I could see them automatically high passing it. (I don’t have easy access right now to something to check the clip to see if it has any data in it.)

The human hearing range is generally considered to be 20 Hz to 20 kHz, though most people don’t hear all the way to either extreme (especially as we age). Infrasound is therefore generally defined as below 20 Hz.

The frequency response of your typical desktop type computer speaker tends to drop off fairly rapidly once you start getting down close to 20 Hz. They don’t reproduce infrasound very well at all. Laptop speakers don’t do as well.

Cell phone speakers are even worse. They start dropping out at much higher frequencies. By the time you get around 20 Hz, their performance is miserable.

WAV files and other lossless data formats can accurately reproduce infrasound frequencies. MP3 and other lossy data formats don’t do so well. MP3 compression samples windows of data and picks out the most audible frequencies and keeps those, while rejecting the less audible frequencies. Infrasound waves, because of their low frequency, don’t cycle completely during the time duration of those sampling windows and therefore don’t get sampled accurately.

Infrasound is by definition sound too low in frequency to hear. But there are a lot of interesting and competing issues in the questions.

Any speaker can reproduce frequencies of arbitrarily low frequency. What it can’t do is play them loud. As frequency drops, the volume of air you need to move to maintain the same loudness rises, half the frequency, four times the air volume. This is why bass drivers are large and can sweep significant depth. In order to get any useful sound pressure levels they have move air. You phone speaker can easily move air at 20Hz. Just not enough that you would be able to hear it. Whereas at 200Hz, moving the same amount of air it is quite audible.

I would be easy to make a shoebox sized desktop speaker that was flat to 20Hz. The problem is that in order to do so, it would have a maximum loudness that was close to useless.

An obvious example of a very small driver capable of very deep bass is a headphone driver. I have a pair of Etymotic ER-4P. The actual driver in these is not much larger than a grin of rice, yet when properly fitted, these earphones can reproduce prodigious bass, as good as anything you will ever hear. They can do this because they are directly coupled to the eardrum, and the actual volume of air they need to shift is minuscule.

There are other considerations.

Your ear can’t hear below 20Hz. But you may perceive the presence of energy at lower frequencies if they modulate the sound you do hear. Eventually you will hear modulation as a tremolo effect rather than low frequency energy, but there is a cutover.

This leads into a really neat effect. The missing fundamental.

If your ear hears the second and third (and maybe higher) harmonics of a note, it will insert the fundamental. So you could play 40Hz and 60Hz, and you ear would hear the presence of 20Hz. This effect is used to advantage in a range of settings. The very deep notes of a pipe organ actually have the majority of their energy in the harmonics, with maybe 20% or less of their output at the fundamental. The ear still perceives the deep power of the beast. (At low frequencies the brain receives phase information as well as frequency, so is probably able to recognise the harmonics as being in phase and correlated. ) There are effects boxes that create the needed harmonics, and they may be used in recording, performance, and many domestic home theatre systems have the option to synthesise bass this way. It is quite possible to make a phone speaker apparently reproduce deep notes with the same trick.

A noted above, many digital formats are flat to essentially DC. But any compressed audio will almost certainly wipe out and subsonic information. I suspect DSD format won’t hold very low frequencies either. But your bog standard 44.1/16 CD format digital music has the capability, even if the recordings will almost certainly lose it. Tape has an intrinsic low frequency cutoff.

Re the missing fundamental, here’s a blog entry from Scientific American on that topic: Your Telephone Is Lying to You About Sounds.

From the blog, this sentence has a link to sample sounds: “I found an (http://www.khoomei.com/forum/uploads/1180135123.mp3) of some examples”.

Load the mp3 into Audacity, display the waveform with “spectrum”, and be amazed.

I seem to remember a pretty cool “speaker” system to reproduce sub 20 hz content that was in effect just a fan with variable pitch blades. The pitch of the blades was controlled by the audio amp. I don’t have the time to look for links at the moment though.

Yup, that would work. There are a range of ways of generating very low frequency audio. As is occasionally mentioned, there has been some research attempting to make some form of anti-personal weapon out of infra-sound - with mixed success. One way is to modulate the flow of compressed air.

In fact you can make a perfectly satisfactory loudspeaker this way. Such a speaker can go seriously loud. There are speakers that are designed for mounting on aircraft that can be used for wide area public address from the air - for things like major emergencies - that are fed from bleed air from the aircraft’s turbine. Good for helicopter mounted speakers.*

  • There were suggestions that the loudspeakers mounted in some helicopters in Vietnam (think Ride of the Valkyrie - Apocalypse Now) were such speakers, but it turns out they were not. Those speakers were conventional voice coil compression drivers feeding horns. The power amplifier was the largest tube based audio amp I have ever seen. It looked more like something you would run a radio station transmitter with.

See rotary woofer. Look also for YouTube videos demonstrating them.

Is it that the machinery of the ear can’t send a signal to the brain when it’s hit with <20Hz sound? or is it that the brain/mind can’t comprehend the signal corresponding to <20Hz sound? Or both?

Just curious as to where the limitation really is.