Curious Adventures with Vibrations #2: Another musical study for vibrating bladders and balloons

Some Facts About Balloons

Here are 2 things you might not know about balloons:

Balloon Fact #1

Before rubber versions were introduced in 1829, most toy balloons were home-made from pig's bladders.

Pig’s bladders are a hit at any child’s party.

Balloon Fact #2

Balloons can help alert you to the vibrational elements of music.

Musical balloon bladders down at the Little House on the Prairie.

Balloons as Vibrotactile Aids

In my Curious Adventures with Vibrations #1, I described an informal, ‘homemade’ experiment in which I held a balloon all day and found that it increased my sensitivity to vibrations, even after I put the balloon down.

An informal balloon experiment with vibrations that you can try at home.

The Balloon Study from my PhD

In today's post I describe another experiment in which I tested this hypothesis under more formal conditions with a group of 16 participants: 4 deaf and 12 hearing (for more details see the full study in my PhD, available here on pages 61 - 68).

The Balloon Study I undertook on September 17, 2017, in Trinity College Dublin looked a bit different to the intimate, candle-lit scene on the poster.

In a Trinity College Dublin media lab, I had each participant in the study 'listen' to the same piece of music three times under controlled conditions:

1) Participants ‘listen’ the first time with empty hands.

2) Participants ‘listen’ a second time with a balloon held between their hands.

3) Participants ‘listen’ a third and final time with empty hands.

The piece of music I played to participants was a long-time favorite of mine: Eddie Bo’s ‘Check Your Bucket’.

Please check it out below. It’s a cracking tune.

I also had the participants fill out the following form after each ‘listening’:

Each participant ranked their vibrotactile experience after each ‘listening’ using this Likert scale.

Results of The Balloon Study

For both deaf and hearing participants, the results from this controlled study confirmed what I’d casually observed in my previous experiment at home:

1) sensitivity to musical vibration is heightened when holding a balloon and

2) this increased sensitivity is maintained after the balloon is put down.

There was much more to The Balloon Study than I describe in this post, so feel free to find details on pages 61 - 68 of my PhD at the link below.

Perspective is All

For me, The Balloon Study suggests that the world we each experience is not a given reality shared by all, but rather a reality that we each re-create to a large extent based on our unique and momentary sensory perspective: e.g., what we're paying attention to and what we have been taught, among other things.

Beyond the wider implications of this principle in terms of human identity, for me as a composer it suggests that approaching music simply as an experience for our ears is arbitrary.

I believe that a great deal can be learned about music from deaf individuals, whose necessarily different sensory perspective can open new musical vistas for hearing people, be they musicians or casual listeners.

I try to approach music as a sense ensemble, a collaboration between multiple senses.

Musical experience involves a combination of senses, AKA, a Sense Ensemble.

Much of my compositional work in the past 15 years has aimed at alerting ‘listeners’ to this ever-present, multisensory reality.

In coming posts, I’ll continue to explore this phenomenon through further research and musical experiments.

See you then.