"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" Consider for a moment the power that visualization allows. Everything can be a matter of perspective and if you have better ways to represent information, you can access it in a clearer more precise way to see farther or closer. It can give you advantages orders of magnitude above or below anyone you face.

For quite a long time musical skills have been associated with mathematical skills.¹ Of course, correlation is not causation yet there are some benefits to it.² As the neurological reasons that go for it, they use similar regions in the brain, at least for pattern recognition³. It appears that both skills if stimulated at critical periods of development can be turned into talents, as they will have frictionless paths to privileged information from then on.⁴

In the case of normal people and music, this stimulus is dependent on statistical exposition to the stimulus of the structure. The more you are exposed to a particular stimulus the more intuitive it becomes the retrieval of such experience.⁵ A Language like mandarin that puts a strong emphasis on the pitch as it's a tonal language is quite the example. This specializes the range of sounds children are exposed to while growing up. Perhaps the reason the prevalence of perfect pitch is so high among their(Mandarin) speakers compared to the rest of the world.⁶

Nonetheless, there's evidence this can be exploited and changed even in adults.5 To acquire perfect pitch, a great singing voice or a perfect accent. With the tools, I'm about to show you.

The complexity of the sounds you are exposed to and the constrained reliable systematic sequence they use, force your brain to grasp and use the feelings your surroundings bring you, this provides you with an advanced plane of understanding, part of what is called the sapir-whorf hypothesis. The structure of the language affects the worldview or cognition of the speaker

Now, let me expose you to an interesting way to understand the world of compression waves.

You can represent the multitude of sound waves after going through a transductor in an amplitude/longitude graph like sinus waves. This is what an oscilloscope normally shows. You can extract data from such visual representations. If there's perturbation or other derived readings like the intensity or rhythm.

Depending on the scope, you could get those quantizations of real-time waves into a graph spectrum like what most people see in their MP3 players. Pressure/Time, the red band represents the same single layer at a specific moment (fig 1)

You can get even more information by displaying individual bands of frequencies. You get a spectrum analysis. If you turn it 90° to the left and start mapping it against time, you obtain a spectrogram. Frequency/Time the red band represents the same single layer at a specific moment (fig 2)

The pressure information can be portrayed by visualization technique like heat maps, where the redder the more intense the sound pressure wave. The information on frequency/time is closer to a music pentagram and with the appropriate training can be read and used to manipulate sound. Is possible to recognize visually differences in speech that otherwise would be never accessible for most people. ⁷

For instance for a non-native trying to learn the language trying to pick up the differences in pronunciation between (Hot, Hat, Hit and Head).

Source1 Source2

By using this type of visualization as retroactive feedback you can learn new language's pronunciation or music orders of magnitude faster.

(When I started on my own to learning English and to sing, I used this technique with wonderful results.)

As the harmonics disappear I hope you can see your perspective changing to a new vanishing point. Like ripples that vanish into the horizon, cause that's what they are.

I was thinking of doing a Video of me singing, demonstrating this, but only if people request it. Editing Video is a pain in the ass.

This is some of the cool weird shit you can do.

Let me know in the comments

---

References:

1 Scientific American: Is There a Link between Music and Math? By Nadine Gaab, Jennifer Zuk on May 1, 2017

2 The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music by Isabelle Peretz and Robert J. Zatorre (Chapter: Does Exposure to Music Have Beneficial Side Effects? E. Glenn Schellenberg)

3 Miendlarzewska, E. A., & Trost, W. J. (2013). How musical training affects cognitive development: rhythm, reward, and other modulating variables. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, 279.

4 Semir Zeki, John Paul Romaya1, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa and Michael F. Atiyah. The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates. Front. Hum. Neurosci., 13 February 2014 Https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00068

5 Stephen C. Van Hedger, Shannon L.M. Heald, Rachelle Koch, Howard C. Nusbaum. Auditory working memory predicts individual differences in absolute pitch learning. Cognition Volume 140, July 2015, Pages 95–110

6 Pfordresher, P.Q. & Brown, S. Enhanced production, and perception of musical pitch in tone language speakers. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics August 2009, Volume 71, Issue 6, pp 1385–1398.

7 Virtual Linguistics Campus Where I learned most of this stuff some time ago, lovely people.

---

Images: Intro-Image was taken from Pixabay and modified, iZotope RX software, Voice vista software, Google Images labeled for reuse with modification or reference included.