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Comment by z9znz | Hacker News Reader

They really should have said "inaudible" rather than undetectable. It is detectable (as they note)... just not as what we think of as sound. [edit - fix; how did I leave out words?]

I don't know how common this is now, but at one time it was popular in the car audio world to mount "ass shaker" devices to seats to emphasize bass feeling without requiring the space of a normal speaker. I think cinemas have done this too.

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Their specific claim is "not consciously detectable" (different from "inaudible"), which they had a side-experiment to verify:

>To confirm that the VLFs were not consciously detectable, 17 new participants completed a two-alternative forced choice task using the same VLF speakers ... Participants performed at chance

I have to say I think they did something wrong then in their testing of detectability? On a club/concert setup, or even plenty of subwoofers, you can very much feel the 20-40hz range that they are adding/removing in figure C. Something seems off here.

I know places that do it. One was three block away from where I lived. It made goddamn impossible to sleep, these waves travel trough ground like it's nothing and you don't usually hear them, but when you lay on the bed you can feel them it scrambles your brain.

For a more recent trend, there are now wearable vests that vibrate to the music [1] [2]

[1]: https://www.woojer.com/

[2]: https://subpac.com/

It's not so recent. The Aura Interactor (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_Interactor) was released in 1994...

Isn’t the ButtKicker effectively a speaker voice coil with a weight attached to it instead of a cone?

But none of the subjects detected it...

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