Octobass | Hacker News Reader

Octobass

atlasobscura.com

107 pointskeepamovin25 comments

Co-Builder of the last two in Montreal here, actually the octobass shown in the article is incomplete, it lacks the pedals that are present on the original one by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. These pedals allows for legato, which is not achievable if you play only with the levers.

About those in Montreal, one of them is a replica (+ minor upgrades) of the original one, and two of them are driven with motors.

You can see some close up in [1]

[1] https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2024/08/14/irez-vous-voir-...

This is the HN we came for. Wow. The guy that built this!

The Musical Instrument Museum is one of the best things to do in Phoenix. It's also one of my favorite museums in the world.

Yes, definitely plan to spend a few hours - it's a massive museum packed with musical instruments and cultures from around the world. They give you positional-aware headsets that play music and information as you near a display.

That place is amazing. Went there once thinking it would be a 30 minute diversion before we did other stuff. We spent nearly 4 hours in there.

Wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone in Phoenix.

There's also a very nice musical instrument museum in Hamamatsu, Japan [1]. I really enjoyed it and would like to go again.

[1] https://www.gakkihaku.jp/en/

Serious question - why else do I want to go to Phoenix? Say enough for a long weekend. I keep hearing good things about this museum but Phoenix is too far away for me to go just for this.

I have family there, which is the only reason I would ever go to Phoenix.

"The Montreal Symphony Orchestra is the only orchestra that owns one of these unusual instruments"

They actually have three. https://www.osm.ca/en/octobasses/

Here's a video of one being played (sort of): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K3VdVbBOxw

Skip to 5:41 to hear it actually played. Although I assume you'd need very good speakers and I'm not sure if the YT audio compression is good for very low tones.

At least for my hearing, there is a fall off around 20hz, though that could be my headphones.

https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

I can't speak for YouTube's specific compression, but since there's less information in low frequency sounds they should compress better than high frequency sounds.

Anecdata: the bass in low bitrate online drum and bass radio in the 2000s always came through cleaner than the mids and treble.

Where "sort of" depends on your personal answer to "does spending 15 minutes recording yourself making various noises with it, then editing the clips together count as "playing"?".

For years, a friend of mine (in San Francisco) and I (in New York City) have sent one another an image [1] of one of these being tuned any time we’re doing coast-to-coast software debugging (especially relevant when we were working on a realtime collaborative text editor).

[1] https://www.loc.gov/item/2014714519/

Kinda funny, my son recently started playing both guitar and bass guitar and quickly got into building them. He mashed up a Ukulele with a fretless Guitar and put two bridges on the Guitar so it has a harp section. Just before this got posted he came around and asked me about the physics of building an (electric) bass guitar tuned an octave or two octaves lower than a normal bass guitar.

I do remember this tall bass. A very cool and unusual museum, BTW. Phoenix is a fun town. The Botanical Garden too is not to be missed.

“Some of the instruments fall below the human hearing range, only the vibrations can be felt,” feels unreal to me for some reason. I can’t imagine a vibration rattling through me without hearing something at that power.

Sounds like something you’ll have to try! :)

Apparently this is a thing that was used in old horror movies.

Subsonic music would play just before a scary encounter, creating a feeling of uneasiness to the audience without any consciously perceptible stimulous, and thus priming the audience for the horror to come.

The interwebz once told me that the human eye resonates at 19Hz or so, which apparently when triggered is very useful for inducing a sense of fear.

It's used to rattle more than just humans with processes like DFAT [0]. Here's the NASA handbook on their use [1].

For experiences that are a little more human friendly, subsonic audio is something that's also explored more commonly in the noise art. Stefanie Egedy [2] is one artist that's been working in that space lately.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-field_acoustic_testing

[1]: https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/NASA-HDBK...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Yo2hcSAbc

"With a range so deep it goes lower than humans can hear"

To be fair, the difference between "sound" and "air pressure" is vibes. A tire inflator is probably putting out infrasonic frequencies, too.

"Bass! How low can you go?" (Public Enemy - Bring the Noise)

Saw it in Phoenix.

Definitely big.

Wouldn’t recommend for slap.

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