Sounds, noises are wonderious and meaningful but they also do so much more.
What is sound? Why do I need to know?
What are some of the Laws of Physics?
Why do things wear out?
Why do we have to die? Does sound have anything to do with our dying?
As a youth I did what most boys did growing up in the south; I had summertime jobs, killed time standing on street corners, chased girls (didn’t catch many), hung out, thought about college (but not that much), chased girls, hung out at the ice cream parlor during the day and pool hall and the movie theater in the evenings. At this time in my life there were no shopping malls or credit cards and drugs were not on every street corner and alcohol was covered in plain brown bags. It was a time when full-service service stations checked your tires, cleaned your windshield, checked your oil, filled your gas tank for .29 cents a gallon and you received free glasses, dishes and redeemable green stamps. I worked a bit in oil as a roughneck, then spent eight years before I turned seventeen working in a shotgun sawmill. That is where I was introduced to noise, real loud noise. There were times at the mill when guys would be hurt seriously and three were even killed but that was our way-of-life then and we never thought about longevity. The basic motto of my crowd was, “…live fast…die young…and make a pretty corpse…” I was just a kid during WWII and in college during Korea so I was still naďve when it came to the likes of death and dying as I was still chasing girls and still not catching many. It wasn’t until I served in Vietnam that I fully understood how a youth grows up very quickly and just how loud exploding shells can be.
One of my summer jobs between college semesters was in Flint Michigan working on an assembly line building Buicks automobiles. The summer was 1955 and Buicks were built like tanks and the girls like gazelles. Maybe that was one of the reason I could never catch any. My dad was some kind of supervisor that allowed him access to all divisions of the GM plant which I guess was good. “You wanna see the boiler-plate division?” Dad asked one evening as he was downing draft beers and I was ogling the ladies prying their $5.00 trade for a quickie.
“Sure” I said with naiveté written all over my teen face.
The boiler division turned out to be where GM receives old engine blocks, cleans and recycles them into new V-8 throaty 452 cubic inch monsters that were the power-plant for those two-ton Grand Sports with mag wheels. Did I mention they got around 8 MPG when finely turned but in those days I didn’t care as the only real decision I had to make were to give one of the ladies my $5.00 for a quickie or fill up my Buicks gas tank.
The first process of recycling old engine blocks was to clean them in a huge steel vat-like cylinder. If you have never heard metal engine blocks being tumbled inside a huge steel cylinder the noise is similar to standing behind a 747 as it approaching take-off speed. Dbs exceed 16,000Hz on the -8.5 on the C dB scale. What does that say? The 747 is in the neighborhood of 140dBA so that says, Noise with a capital N.
I never paid much attention to noise until that day and then only because as I left the plant with heavy ringing in both ears I found myself saying “huh” for a week and missing out on all conversations around and about me.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it fall, was there sound?”
Physics rule our lives. You don’t necessarily need to know all the “rules of physics” but sometimes it helps explaining life.
Do you have any idea why people die?
Did you know at the turn of the nineteenth century life expectancy was 47 years and now in 2006 men can expect 77 years and the ladies another eight? Men can stretch their 77 years to a few more if they still have a “quickie” now and then and do it quietly. Works for the ladies also, but if they want to be noisy, it is allowed. As a man I did not learn that lesson till late in life that women have the same or stronger sex drives as men.
Many things can kill a person. Actually anything can kill a person; car accidents, bullets, knives to name a couple obvious threats. Paperclips, ballpoint pens, banana skins, water, bare hands, etc..etc. are some of the not so obvious threats but when you get right down to the facts, anything can be used to kill, even your mind.
The human body does not have to be killed to stop living. Most of us will live out our programmed life and die a “natural” death. I never fully understood “natural” but then I found that “sounds/noises” can push us toward that “natural” death.
Do you know the human body is delicate and tough at the same time?
Delicate is the touch of a rose, a tender kiss from a lover, a kind word when the world is going to hell or being told you are beautiful during your third trimester or being bald and fat is OK.
Tough is the intangible of life. Tough is something that has a job and does it without fanfare or reward. Tough is the body that carries your soul until your tissue, cells and blood and most of your tubing wears out or clogs to be replaced with hog guts or something synthetic that is not bio-degradable. The body does not have to be killed… given time it simply wears out from day to day usage.
Wears out? Now that is a profound statement.
Automobile have built-in obsoleteness, as do highways, building, toys, and everything man-made. If we made it… it will eventually break or wear out just from doing what it was designed to do – promise.
I learned tough and delicate from two young, very pretty, talented and obviously educated ladies named Peggy Newell and Amanda Holliday a couple days ago.
Peggy was the operator of an Ultrasound machine at the Lake Regional Hospital in Osage Beach Missouri. Osage Beach is a place people go to vacation, to play, to be free and loose and not wear your bikini top if you so choose and to stay up evenings partying till the sun comes up, if you so choose.
What does all this have to do with Noise?
Did you know your body is a very noisy place? I didn’t, but then Peggy showed me REAL noise and it was all inside me. Many times in the quiet of an evening I can hear and feel my heart beating and constant ringing in both ears. Several times during fire fights in Vietnam I was so close to mother earth I could hear my blood rushing through all my veins. When your adrenaline is topped off, the things you hear see and feel are maximized.
Peggy showed me another way.
The other day during a kidney ultrasound exam she had me laying on my side, shirt up, warm grease smeared over my hairy stomach and side. She began by placing a hand-held gadget in all that grease, clicking a few keys, turned a knob then turned the volume up a bit on her machine. The sounds I heard were coming from my body, from my organs; from me…I thought I was back in Flint in the middle of that boiler plant.
I didn’t say anything at first then as Peggy and Amanda explained what was happening and what I was hearing, my first thought was, “…I now understand why body parts, organs, veins, tissue parts, and stuff wears out after a few years. All my working parts were in constant motion! The sounds were indescribable to me but to Peggy each mummer, rub, thrill meant something. To amplify just what that means to average-Joe, me, she was not only just listening to my body working, she was recording, interpolating and measuring it. Measuring!!
The human body, like other man-made things also come with built in obsoleteness. Some Biblical folks had over 600 birthdays but as Bill Clinton said on his fiftieth, “…I have had more birthdays then I will have…” Sobering… but all so true .
Both my hands had long ago gone to sleep because of the cramped position I had them under my head, but other then all fingers tingling, I was comfortable. The exam room was a 10’ x 12’ non-descript normal hospital room with a sink, a couple cabinets, some shelving with clean towels and a good sized Ultrasound machine/recorder/player unit that would have made Star Trek’s C3PO proud.
As Peggy listened she would occasionally pause, reflect, and tap a button on her small menu selection pad or twist a dial, then look seriously at the monitor while drawing a dimension line from point A to B on the screen and measure.
“Measuring something important?” as I tried to be flip and relaxed.
“No…” then a slight crooked grin, “…just some blood vessels.” Peggy was cute in her seriousness.
She was actually measuring not only the working size of the blood supply to my kidney but speed and amounts of liquid being moved. She was measuring my kidney, its tubing, its construction, its functionality.
When I lose my right kidney to cancer a few years ago I was told the left would most likely “grow a bit” to help compensate for doing all the work rather then sharing with another kidney. Peggy was measuring the organ to see if it was doing what it was suppose to be doing.
In a matter of only a few minutes Peggy and Amanda knew more about what made me tick, rub and mummer then a long-term wife and more then a few lady friends from all corners of the world.
Talented people that play the piano or surgeons working inside you have great hand, eye coordination. It’s the same kind of coordination with people that can type on a keyboard. Really good typists can listen to music, carry on an intelligent conversation, look around the room and drink a beer all at the same time. Coordinated is not a strong enough word to describe these people. Peggy and Amanda are in this elite group.
Type? No not me. I use the religious method when faced with putting words to paper.
I use to think of ultrasound technicians as people pregnant ladies went to be told if their unborn child had a willy or not.
These ladies that operate an ultrasound machine are highly intelligent and dedicated. They can look for willies, but these technician ladies can do so much more those babies born today would be entering school before I could finish outlining their qualification and abilities.
Ultrasound machines, some are also refer to as Dopplers but whatever you call it, is much more then just looking at a fetus to see if there is a Willy or long curly blond hair to be welcomed into this world. Today’s technology allows non-invasive techniques to see, and hear what our body is actually doing.
Doctors still “practice” but with more and more sophisticated machine being built they are burying fewer mistakes.
Just a couple more facts and specification and I will let you go and say thank you for taking a few minutes to read about – Sound.
1. Your ears are designed to receive sounds and pass those vibrations to your central nerve system for interpolation, and they do that efficiently, but sounds are the most damaging elements the ears will ever have to endure.
2. Sounds are generally audible to the human ear if their frequency (number of vibrations per second) lies between 20 and 20,000 vibrations per second, but the range varies considerably with the individual. Sound waves with frequencies less than those of audible waves are called subsonic; those with frequencies above the audible range are called ultrasonic.
3. A sound wave is usually represented graphically by a wavy, horizontal line; the upper part of the wave (the crest) indicates a condensation and the lower part (the trough) indicates a rarefaction. This graph, however, is merely a representation and is not an actual picture of a wave. The length of a sound wave, or the wavelength, is measured as the distance from one point of greatest condensation to the next following it or from any point on one wave to the corresponding point on the next in a train of waves.
4. Sound travels more slowly in gases than in liquids, and more slowly in liquids than in solids. Since the ability to conduct sound is dependent on the density of the medium, solids are better conductors than liquids; liquids are better conductors than gases.
5. Sound waves can be reflected, refracted (or bent), and absorbed as light waves can be. The reflection of sound waves can result in an echo—an important factor in the acoustics of theaters and auditoriums. A sound wave can be reinforced with waves from a body having the same frequency of vibration, but the combination of waves of different frequencies of vibration may produce “beats” or pulsations or may result in other forms of interference.
6. A typical ultrasound machine ranges in cost from $30,000 to $180,000.
7. A basic ultrasound machine has the following parts: a. Transducer probe b. Central processing unit (CPU) c. Transducer pulse controls d. Display e. Keyboard / cursor f. Disk storage device g. Printer.
Don’t go away…. Just a few more minutes...
What is Ultrasound? Ultrasound or ultrasonography is a medical imaging technique that uses high frequency sound waves and their echoes. The technique is similar to the echolocation used by bats, whales and dolphins, as well as SONAR used by submarines. In ultrasound, the following events happen: The ultrasound machine transmits high-frequency (1 to 5 megahertz) sound pulses into your body using a probe.
The sound waves travel into your body and hit a boundary between tissues (e.g. between fluid and soft tissue, soft tissue and bone). Some of the sound waves get reflected back to the probe, while some travel on further until they reach another boundary and get reflected. The reflected waves are picked up by the probe and relayed to the machine.
The machine calculates the distance from the probe to the tissue or organ (boundaries) using the speed of sound in tissue (5,005 ft/s or1,540 m/s) and the time of the each echo's return (usually on the order of millionths of a second). The machine displays the distances and intensities of the echoes on the screen, forming a two dimensional image like the one shown below.
What sound does one hand clapping make?
What is sound? What are some of the Laws of Physics?
Why do things wear out?
Why do we have to die?
You now have those answers and a lot more you never thought you needed.
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Reviewed by Robert Dugger
6/25/2006
You have written a nice piece here about sounds. Keep up the good work.
Intense, especially the reflection of hearing the blood in your veins in Vietnam! The most beautiful sound my ears ever heard through an ultrasound machine was my baby boy's heartbeat. Wonderful, informative article about 'sound'...
