Towards Defining the Potential of Electroacoustic Infrasonic Music

Infrasounds, frequencies ≤ 20 Hz, occupying the sonic landscape beyond pitch, offer a wide terrain of musical potential to the contemporary electroacoustic composer, a potential that has so far been poorly defined or exploited. This paper is a brief tutorial on employing infrasounds in electroacoustic composition. Infrasounds possess musical potential within the auditory and tactile modalites as either airborne and solidean vibrations, either containing or psychoacoustically suggesting a fundamental wave ≤ 20 Hz. The infrasonic composer must consider a range of issues with respect to 1) equal-loudness contours (the detection threshold being > 70 dB below 20 Hz), 2) intersubject variability within these contours, 3) obstacles in finding hardware to diffuse these oscillations at the SPL needed for their detection, 4) their safe usage (anticipating harmonic distortion in hardware when working at high SPLs), as well as engineering an aesthetic context through interactivity and sensory conditioning to optimize a positive-valence response. There is great potential for sonic, vibrotactile, and intersensorial composition with respect to space and the body, e.g., interacting with or conveying large architectural spaces, evoking psychosomatic interactions through biorhythmic suggestion, and exploring the musicality of the body through its peak resonances.