Phantom rings are the sensation and the false belief that one can hear his or her mobile phone ringing or feel it vibrating, when in fact the telephone is not doing so. Other terms for this concept include ringxiety and fauxcellarm. Some sound experts believe that because cellphones have become a fifth limb for many, people now live in a constant state of phone vigilance, and hearing sounds that seem like a telephone’s ring can send an expectant brain into action.

They may be experienced while taking a shower, watching television, or using a noisy device. Humans are particularly sensitive to auditory tones between 1,000 and 6,000 hertz, and basic mobile phone ringers often fall within this range. This frequency range can generally be more difficult to locate spatially, thus allowing for potential confusion when heard from a distance. False vibrations are less understood, however, and could have psychological or neurological sources.

In addition to cellular phones, other attention grabbing devices such as sirens, trucks backing up, horns or crying babies in a commercial message have been generically labeled as phantom ringing. Some doorbells or telephone ring sounds are modeled after pleasant sounds from nature. This backfires when such devices are used in rural areas containing the original sounds. The owner is faced with the constant task of determining if it is the device or the actual sound.

The cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations. This effect reveals one of the surprising abilities of our auditory system, which enables us to talk in a noisy place.

The effect can occur both when we are paying attention to one of the sounds around us and when it is invoked by a stimulus which grabs our attention suddenly. For example, when we are talking with our friend in a crowded party, we still can listen and understand what our friend says even if the place is very noisy, and can simultaneously ignore what another nearby person is saying. Then if someone over the other side of the party room calls out our name suddenly, we also notice that sound and respond to it immediately.

It was first described and named by Colin Cherry in 1953. Much of the early work in this area can be traced to problems faced by air traffic controllers in the early 1950s. At that time, controllers received messages from pilots over loudspeakers in the control tower. Hearing the intermixed voices of many pilots over a single loudspeaker made the controller’s task very difficult.

Cherry conducted attention experiments in which subjects were asked to listen to two different messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time and try to separate them. His work reveals that our ability to separate sounds from background noise is based on the characteristics of the sounds, such as the gender of the speaker, the direction from which the sound is coming, the pitch, or the speaking speed.

This phenomenon is still very much a subject of research, in humans as well as in computer implementations, where it is typically referred to as source separation or blind source separation. The neural mechanism in human brains is not yet fully clear.

Brainwave synchronization is a practice that aims to cause brainwave frequency to synchronize with a frequency corresponding to the intended brain state. The technique has been used to induce sleep or to treat numerous psychological and physiological conditions.

It is usually performed with the use of specialized medical software. It depends upon a “frequency following” response, a naturally occurring phenomenon where the human brain has a tendency to change its dominant EEG frequency to the frequency of a dominant external stimulus. Such a stimulus may be aural, as in the case of binaural or monaural beats and isochronic tones, or visual, as with a dreamachine, a combination of the two with a mind machine, or even electromagnetic radiation.

Brainwave synchronization has been used in one form or another for centuries, from shamanistic societies’ use of drum beats to Ptolemy noting in 200 A.D. the effects of flickering sunlight generated by a spinning wheel. In the 1930s and ’40s, with then-new EEG equipment and strobe lights, W. Gray Walter performed some of the first scientific research on the subject. Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, interest in altered states led many artists to become interested in the subject, most notably Brion Gysin who, along with a Cambridge math student, invented the Dreammachine.

From the 1970s to date there have been numerous studies and various machines built that combine light and sound. These efforts were aided by continued development of micro circuitry and other electronic breakthroughs allowing for ever more sophisticated equipment for measuring and inducing brainwave synchronization. One of the most important breakthroughs was the discovery of binaural beats, first published in Scientific American in 1973 by Gerald Oster. With the development of isochronic tones by Arturo Manns, combined with more sophisticated equipment, these discoveries led to many attempts to use brainwave synchronization in the treatment of numerous diseases and disorders.

Booker T. Jones is an instrumentalist, songwriter and arranger, best known for fronting the band Booker T. and the MGs. He has also worked in the studios with some of the most highly regarded artists of our time, earning him a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

Jones was a child prodigy, playing the oboe, saxophone, trombone, and piano at school and serving as organist at his church. He attended Booker T. Washington High School with future stars like Isaac Hayes’s writing partner David Porter, and Earth, Wind, and Fire’s Maurice White.

Booker T. & the MGs are an instrumental R&B band that was influential in shaping the sound of Southern Soul and Memphis Soul. For many years, the official story was that the bandname The MGs was meant to stand for Memphis Group, not the sports car of the same name. However, this proved not to be the case, as musician and record producer Chips Moman, active in Stax Records when the band was formed, claims they were named after his car.

In June of 1967, they appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, alongside performers like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane. They were also later invited to play Woodstock, but drummer Al Jackson, Jr. was worried about the helicopter needed to deliver them to the site, and so they decided not to play.

The Mexicali Brass were apparently created by Crown Records, a subsidiary of the Bihari Brothers’ Modern Records, in order to cash in on the popularity of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass and The Baja Marimba Band during the 1960s.

Teddy Phillips, the band’s leader, graduated from Oak Park River High School, where he had learned to play the sax in school band. After graduation, he toured with many bands and also worked in radio studio bands for both NBC and CBS

He formed his own band in 1944, the Teddy Phillips Orchestra, which played at local Chicago clubs until 1947, when he played the Aragon Ballroom. The band was a fixture there and at the Trianon and Willowbrook Ballrooms became the best known band in town. Curiously, his popularity came just as the Big Bands era was closing.

By the 1960s, he had transformed the band into the Mexicali Brass, a Las Vegas style Mariachi Band. During the 1970s, he contined performing with the band, and toured the USA briefly.

Bert Kaempfert was a German orchestra leader and songwriter. He made easy listening and jazz oriented records and wrote the music for a number of well-known songs, such as Strangers in the Night and Spanish Eyes.

He was born in Hamburg, Germany, where he received his lifelong nickname, “Fips”. He studied at the School of Music and was hired by Hans Busch to play with his orchestra before serving as a bandsman in the German Navy during World War II. He later formed his own big band, toured with them, then worked as an arranger and producer.

One contributor to Kaempfert’s music was guitarist-bassist Ladislav “Ladi” Geisler, who popularized the famous “knackbass” (crackling bass) sound, which became the most distinctive feature of many Kaempfert recordings. It is a treble staccato bass guitar sound in which the bass string is plucked with a pick and immediately suppressed to cancel out any sustain.

Tahitian Sunset was sampled extensively by the lo-fi dance artists Lemon Jelly as their track In the Bath.

Cymatic therapy is a scientifically unsupported alternative medicine technique using acoustic waves which was developed in the 1960s by Sir Peter Guy Manners. It is based on the assumption that human cells, organs, and tissues have each a natural resonant frequency which changes when perturbed by illness.

Starting in the sixth century BC, Greek philosopher Pythagoras was the first to use music to heal a person’s body and emotions. During the eighth century, German scientist Ernst Chladni proved that sound does affect matter. Chlandi, the father of acoustics showed that as he drew a bow across the edge of a metal plate covered with sand, the sand moved and formed geometric patterns.

Cymatic therapists apply different audible frequencies and combinations of sound waves which they claim entrain malfunctioning components back to their healthy vibratory state and promote natural healing. The operational principle of cymatic therapy is out of step with mainstream scientific thought, and it is viewed with skepticism by most medical doctors. Relying on this type of treatment alone, and avoiding or delaying conventional medical care, may have serious health consequences.

Cymatic therapy is operationally, historically, and philosophically distinct from the many medical uses of ultrasound and from the more mainstream practice of music therapy.

Comfort noise is artificial background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the silence in a transmission resulting from voice activity detection or from the audio clarity of modern digital lines.

Some modern telephone systems such as wireless and VoIP use voice activity detection, a form of squelching where low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In digital audio transmissions, this saves bandwidth of the communications channel by transmitting nothing when the source volume is under a certain threshold, leaving only louder sounds such as a speaker’s voice to be sent. However, improvements in background noise reduction technologies can occasionally result in the complete removal of all noise.

The result of receiving total silence, especially for a prolonged period, has a number of unwanted effects on the listener, including the following:

• The listener may believe that the transmission has been lost, and therefore hang up prematurely.
• The speech may sound choppy and difficult to understand.
• The sudden change in sound level can be jarring to the listener.

To counteract these effects, comfort noise is added, usually on the receiving end in wireless or VoIP systems, to fill in the silent portions of transmissions with artificial noise. The noise generated is at a low but audible volume level, and can vary based on the average volume level of received signals to minimize jarring transitions.

In modern VoIP products, users may control whether they want comfort noise enabled or disabled. During the siege of Leningrad in 1942, the beat of a metronome was used as comfort noise on the Leningrad radio network, indicating that the network was still functioning.