Won't someone think of the dogs?
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Wrong warm water tastes smoother and smells weirder
Cold water tastes spikier and doesnt smell weird
Aaaaand I can hear my Tinnitus again
As someone who has done plenty of sound recordist work, it's known as 'room tone.'
Also, I feel seen because I've had to explain that so many times. Even to people who really should know.
I don't work in a sound recording space, but I know this because I had to do a voice recording for a project in middle school.
The recording picked up some extraneous noise in between a couple sentences, so I opened Audacity, took the noisy chunk, and deleted it outright so that there was empty space. It sounded very weird for some reason... so I simply recorded over the gap with me doing nothing, as if I were in between sentences. It worked! And I had no idea why...
Granted, this was less 'room tone' than 'white noise from the amount of gain on my shitty mic', but same concept.
Ditto. We call it 'atmos' here.
Conclusion of a stupid brain: Dolby sells nothing, their top cinema technology
Terry Pratchett writes about this, how there is a difference between the sound of someone not being there and the sound of someone hiding and not making any noise.
He often writes about how things like bird song can be a type of silence and how a train that always passes at the same time every night, not passing at that time, can wake you up from its absence.
I used to live right next to a big ol' belltower. It'd chime every hour and on special days, it'd be chiming throughout the day. A friend came to stay and was baffled at how I could sleep and work through it all
I grew up half a block from elevated railroad tracks and it's the same. People visiting kept noticing the trains going by regularly, but I'd been tuning it out all my life and had to work to consciously hear it.
Later in life I visited my childhood home as an adult, and spent the night. It had been long enough since I'd left that I began noticing the damn trains, and I had trouble getting to sleep.
Silence is almost never silent.
I used to live in a pretty decently sized city. The quietest I ever experienced was in an old high-rise apartment after the power went out. I climbed up the seven or so flights of stairs because I needed to get into my unit to grab something, nearly all the residents of the building had vacated or were out of the building for one reason or another, so I was probably only one of about a dozen people inside during the power outage. I don't really know how many were still inside, but I'm sure it wasn't many.
Anyways, after I got into my unit I had to stop and listen for a minute. The windows were all closed and there was nothing. It was so quiet that I couldn't hear anything. At least to my ears that were numbed from the droning of the city. It was a marvelous experience. Normally you hear the buzzing of transformers, rumbles from steps and wheels and other things being moved around, the feint trumming of someone listening to music, and the constant mechanical whirr of the elevators working away. All of that was quiet. It was so still and calm.
I didn't experience that again until I moved into my current residence away from the city. Here I'm so used to the much quieter silence that I can hear the rush of air when the fans from the furnace turn on, I am acutely aware of the bubbling from the pet water fountain we have for our cat in the next room. Even the familiar pattering of my cats paws as he trots down the hallway.
Silence is almost never silent.
John Cage's 4'33 is really so much more of a masterpiece with that in mind.
Gonna be honest, this is a cool anecdote but that isn't relatable to anyone but audiophiles.
(or production nerds, fwiw)
A bit related a few months before me and my wife beame parents a friend of ours stayed by us for a few days with her very active toddler. I will never forget the moment they all left and I was chilling on my couch and it felt like negative sound. Like I would have to hear something just to break even.
The different sounds of "silence" are the same as the different flavors of "water."
You're not hearing the silence, you're still hearing the absence of it caused by different things making little noises. (Or in some cases hallucinating)
You're not tasting the water but the non-water that's in the water.
This is very very true. I have a decent water filtration system at home. I use a stainless steel water container both when I'm home and when I leave. Always highly filtered water. I've gotten so used to the fairly pure water from my filtration system that tap water, doesn't taste right anymore. If someone gives me tap water or something, it kind of shocks me how badly it tastes.
My water filtration stuff isn't the best, so I'm sure my water is filthy compared to some of the stuff you can get, but it's clean enough that I notice when there's a significant drop in quality and purity now.
Meanwhile, I think a lot of purified water tastes kind of bitter and metallic compared to my own tap water. I generally don't like purified water unless it's ice cold. I can taste the minerals in tap water of course but it's not unpleasant to me. It probably just depends on the area. I've noticed the tap water in some states tastes really bad by comparison to mine
That's fair. I usually use an off the shelf water filter like a Brita, and run tap water through it. Usually some kind of activated charcoal filter.
IMO, tap water is fine except for all the lingering crap that water treatment adds to it like chlorine. The levels are "safe for consumption" but I pick up on it and it bothers me.
I've also entirely ruined bottled water for myself. I taste the plastic by-products that have leeched into the water from it's container.
I mean, a lot of this I'll still drink, I just won't necessarily be very happy about it.
I once asked how to make the purest water and just have 100% pure H2O to drink and know what water itself finally tastes like, and was told even if you could do it, drinking it would probably be lethal as it just rips molecules apart binding with everything.
I'm guessing that distilled water is about as close as you can get safely
I dunno why you're being downvoted, you're right.
Pure H2O is rare, and generally only produced in labs. It's considered an industrial solvent. Usually the water we drink has very small amounts of minerals dissolved into it. As the previous poster was saying, albeit indirectly, that's what gives water it's flavor, and also what makes it safe for consumption.
A lot of things are water soluble. With no minerals in the water, you become the minerals that dissolve in water. You can taste pure H2O, if you can get a pure sample, but only a VERY small amount. Like, a sip at most. A few drops would be safer.
When I'm referring to the purity of my water in referring to the lack of presence of chemicals, like chlorine (used to sanitize water) and whatnot, as well as VOCs and other inorganic and organic compounds leeched into the water from the container or vessel used to store/transport the liquid. I'm certain my water still has minerals in it, on trace amounts, as there should be, but nothing that otherwise shouldn't be in drinking water.
Most water treatment plants will use chemicals like chlorine to kill harmful bacteria and microorganisms found in most water supplies. When the chlorine levels drop to a safe level, that treated water is released into the water supply mains to be delivered to you. Other natural impurities will exist, as they always do.
Usually the levels are too low to need to inform people that they exist. Your body will process them without issue. It just makes water taste bad to me. I can always tell if I'm at a restaurant if they are serving tap, filtered, or other kinds of water by how it tastes to me. The "flavor" is more of a measure of how pleased I am to drink it, less the kind of flavour you get from a meal. It's subtle, and I'm keenly aware of it because I've been drinking water from filtered sources for many years now. Stronger flavors like that you would get from Cola or other sodas, will numb you to impurities in the flavor of water. I gave up soda some time ago, and the differences are very apparent to me.
IDK. The science of water and purification is complicated. It must be impure to be safe, but it can't be so impure that it becomes a hazard.
It's tricky business, and something that I'm no expert in. I know enough to keep myself out of trouble. As long as the water doesn't "taste" bad, I'm fine with it.
Not everything is water-soluble. Water is a pretty impressive solvent but it's not alkahest so it certainly doesn't rip apart everything.
As to the actual dangers to organic life, cell membranes etc. being (unsurprisingly) not water soluble: The issue is osmotic pressure. The inside of the cells are salty, the outside less so, which means that water will travel from the area with lower concentration into that of higher concentration until both sides have the same saltiness.
If you're a microrganism with very limited capacity to get rid of that excess water and no mineral reserves you're going to burst. For the rest of us though it's a novel way to burn your tongue. You'll be fine I just burned mine on chilli beans though half of the feeling is probably the Szechuan pepper. No regrets.
Ahh, water. The room tone of beverages. Lol.
I learned all about this from comedy bang bang the podcast.
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