Music Includes Vibration

Your mastoid bone (behind your ear) is built to resonate, like the wood in a Stradivarius. The bone is spongy and contains specialized receptors to detect vibration through skull conduction. When you sing, hum, or speak, you’re experiencing sound through both air conduction (acoustic hearing) and bone conduction (vibration) simultaneously. Below about 20 Hz, you don’t hear frequencies at all - you feel them as pure vibration propagating through fascial networks and bone. This is why bass moves you, why deaf—and award-winning—classical percusionist Evelyn Glennie takes her shoes off in order to perform, why you close your eyes when music gets good. Vibration is part of how blind people can mountain bike. When an alligator’s voice drops really low, you can’t hear it acoustically any more, but you can feel it thrum in your bones.


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