COSMOS Day 13 - The Professor of the Professor and Karaoke Night

One interesting aspect about universities is that professors will teach students, and some of those students will remain at the university, and continue teaching in the same area. Professor John Crooks is no exception, since he was taught by the great Professor Christopher Dobrian: http://music.arts.uci.edu/dobrian/. In general, Professor Dobrian has worked with computer music since it was invented, which makes him a good candidate to lecture on some of his ideas to us. In addition, I believe he said something about having taught a COSMOS class before. That should explain his engaging lecture.

For today, my normal day RA, Laura, had to go somewhere. One of the night RAs in Woodhall, Emilio, took over for her, and Professor Crooks introduced him to the class as one of his former students. This occurrance just goes to show that the line of learning is very easy to trace at times.

One of the topics John wanted us to focus on was on LOUDNESS. One of important ideas to remember about the concept of loudness is that it is an arbirtary term that varies for different humans. The closest scientific term Mr. Dobrian could come up with was "intensity of the sound." With sound being defined as the slight changes in air pressure detected by the ear drum, the intensity (force over a given area) of the changes in air pressure detected by the ear drum would control how "loud" we hear sound. The famliar unit to measure "loudness" would be decibels, or on our little sound system equalizers, "dB." With such units in place, Professor Dobrian said that an exponential change in sound intensity is needed for our ears to hear a linear change in sound intensity. I am barely getting through all of the lecture, and I am starting to confuse myself. Therefore those who read this blog may not complain that I my blog post is too complicated.

On the topic of loudness, COSMOS had a karaoke night. I personally did not think the music was too loud. (The government standard for "loud" is about 80 dB, and that actually can damage one's hearing temporarialy, and the damage can become permanent if one is exposed to such an environment for many years.) Early today, Mr. Dobrian played a simple sine wave at 70 dB and most of the class started covering their ears. The singing was not expecially loud, and the music was not