Another limitation of scholarly publications

These data rarely make it into publication—I'm sorry to report that we don't yet have research journals that embrace multimedia enough to reproduce audio recordings. Admittedly, it's a very particular complaint, but I've always thought this is a shame. 

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), ch. 11

Interesting, but who wants to be in group 3? Yay science.

Just by using this orbital position sonic algorithm, a simple ambient music piece began to do something weird: control how people thought they were moving in space. So we decided to ramp up the evil meter to 11 by slowly changing the modulation rate for different frequency bands. We thought a piece that used this algorithm would make people feel like they were moving but confuse them when some of the sound elements seemed to move one way and some the other. We lovingly titled this "The Vertigo Tour" and unleashed it as a track on our CD.

Despite the fact that I knew I was torturing my listeners, I begged and pleaded for feedback from anyone who got a copy. It broke down in an interesting fashion. After a few minutes of listening, about one-third of the listeners felt like they were moving when the amplitude and phase were synchronized, another third thought the music was moving through the sound field, and the final third got violently ill. Yay science. We had figured out how to induce auditory motion sickness.

Unfortunately, the chair of my department at the time, a dedicated audiophile whose sound system was worth more than my salary, fell into the third category.

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), ch. 8

How was the movie? Huh?? HOW WAS THE MOVIE?

There have been several studies carried out on current films that have shown that the loudness in most major theaters is well above suggested levels for being able to hear the next movie you see.

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), ch. 7, note 43

We want to understand the brain and the mind

No one person, lab, or field understands the brain or the mind. But with 30,000 neuroscientists attending the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference, you get a feel for how incredibly deeply we want to understand it.

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), ch. 11

What jingles do

[A] jingle is not just a way to sell you a thing—it's about linking an object with an emotion and transferring it to your long-term memory without requiring you to pay attention to it.

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012)

A first book is hard

A first book is a very hard thing to write, especially when it involves something yu feel passionate about. It requires bringing together elements scattered over decades of experience and interactions with a huge number of people, places, and things, living and otherwise.

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), Foreword and Acknowledgements