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If you're like me and live nowhere near the Bay Area, you're longing to go to Exploratorium, the hands-on science museum started by Frank Oppenheimer. Or perhaps you're in San Francisco, but you're anxiously awaiting the museum's reopening at Pier 15? Fear not! Exploratorium has just released an app that's like an immersive exhibit on sound.
Sound Uncovered is a magazine-style app where each page lets you interact with a different sound concept. For instance, if you touch each note moving in a clockwise direction on a circular keyboard, you're asked to find the highest note. It can't be done! As you work in a circle, each note sounds higher than the last. It's what you might imagine the sound canals of M.C. Escher's ears to be like. Fortunately, each page will answer the questions, "What's going on?" In the case of this keyboard, each note is actually a six-note chord separated by octaves, and our ear perceives notes separated by octaves as alike. These chords shift in volume and pitch, and repeat in a way that sounds naturally progressive.
There are fun features that show us how our mind works to process sounds, such as listening to a person say a word with your eyes open and then with your eyes shut – it sounds like two different words. This is called the McGurk effect. What we see can affect what we hear. I'm thankful for this app for introducing me to the term misophonia, which I will now self-diagnose. Misophoia is a condition where sounds can cause extreme distress, panic, and rage. Sounds like people clipping their nails and chomping gum drive me so crazy I can hardly stand to be in the same space, especially if that space is a subway car.
There are also a bunch of pages that are fun tricks and conversation starters. I played through the app with my 7-year-old, who loved it. She loved it even more when Dad came home and she could show him some of the features, like what's making the mysterious buzzing noise on page three. There's a tape recorder that you can record and play backwards and forwards where you can try out different visual and sonic palindromes and learn to talk backwards and playback forwards like an episode of Twin Peaks. Our family favorite was "How Old Are Your Ears?" There's a slider that you adjust until you can hear the noise being played. Then the app will tell you how old your ears are. As you age, you lose your ability to hear higher frequencies, and the slider adjusts the frequency of the sound. The kids heard the noise so immediately that I thought they were messing with me. I kept pulling the slider down the page until I finally heard it, yet was delighted to see my ears are a couple years younger than I am. When my husband tried it ... well, let's just say that those years as a college DJ might have had an effect.
I recently had the chance to speak with Rob Semper, Executive Associate Director, and Jean Cheng, Project Director in the Online Engagement Group. They gave me a bit of history about the museum. If you visit the Exploratorium's vast website, you'll see that there are deep reserves of information that parallel the illusion- and perception-based exhibits of the museum. The website started as the 600th website in the world, so it's got some history to it. I really appreciate that the Exploratorium is delivery agnostic – they just want to reach people. Indeed, the number of online visitors has now surpassed physical visitors. Tablets are just another venue to reach people, but they also have the hands-on style play that you might find in an actual exhibit. They were also very eager to include experiments in the app that you can try in real life. There's no digital wizardry going on here.
Sound Uncovered is free, so you should totally go download it right now, and be sure to visit the museum when it reopens on April 17. I may need to make a special trip, but I'm happy to have the app in the meantime.
