Good Vibrations?

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Speaker 4 You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Speaker 5 Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 4 But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 1 I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Dara O'Brien.

Speaker 4 And this is Curious Cases.

Speaker 3 The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

Speaker 1 With the power of science. I mean do we always solve them?

Speaker 3 I mean the hit rate's pretty low.

Speaker 1 But it is with science.

Speaker 3 It is with science.

Speaker 4 Welcome to this week's episode of Curious Cases. Darren, I think our topic is going to resonate with you this week.

Speaker 3 Why would it resonate with me?

Speaker 4 It's about resonance.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's not how a pun works. You can't just say the thing.
Yeah, but it's got double meaning.

Speaker 1 It literally has no double meaning.

Speaker 1 You have to move one step away from the thing, not just say the the thing.

Speaker 4 Go on, go on. Give me a better one.

Speaker 1 God.

Speaker 6 You got one?

Speaker 1 Have I got one? Yeah. No.

Speaker 4 I don't. I don't.
Okay, fine. This is an episode that is going to ring true.

Speaker 1 There we go.

Speaker 1 There we go. That's much better.

Speaker 4 Because we have had a question in from Belinda in Melbourne. Have a listen to this.

Speaker 7 My question is about resonance.

Speaker 7 I'd really like to understand how a bridge such as the one over Tacoma Narrows, Narrows, Washington, USA in 1940 could get tangled up and collapse because its resonant frequency was too close to some outside vibration such as a strong wind.

Speaker 7 Does everything have a resonant frequency? If so, what would the resonant frequency of a human be?

Speaker 4 That was Belinda in Melbourne there.

Speaker 1 How beautifully did she do that?

Speaker 4 Yeah, that was stunning. Stunning.

Speaker 1 Absolutely delightful. I mean, can Belinda read everyone's questions out in the future? Nothing against everyone else, but like, she took such care of it as well.

Speaker 4 She really did. She really did.

Speaker 1 Oh, well, wow, we absolutely know what the question is. It's about resonance.
Resonance,

Speaker 1 I'd never be sure. When is it resonance and when is it vibration?

Speaker 4 Well, I think that's some of the stuff that we need to find out.

Speaker 1 We really do.

Speaker 1 So we're joined by Von der Lewis, Professor of Structural Engineering at Warwick University, and the physicist and oceanographer Helen Chersky of UCL, and also the co-host of Radio 4's environmental show Rare Earth.

Speaker 4 Okay Helen, let's start with you. I mean the basic question first, what is resonance?

Speaker 5 Well we live in a world that wobbles. Things oscillate quite a lot and so there's two stages to understanding resonance and the first thing is to understand a little bit about the wobbling.

Speaker 5 So I'm going to pick an everyday example, a cup of tea, get yourself a cup of tea and if you give the cup a little nudge you will see that the tea or the whatever it is that's in it will slosh from side to side and it's got a certain rate that it sloshes at.

Speaker 5 It doesn't really matter how you push it, it sloshes at exactly the same rate, and that's to do with the physics of the cup and the liquid.

Speaker 5 So, the first thing is that everything in the world around us, pretty much, has this frequency that we call a natural frequency that's the rate at which it will vibrate or wobble if you just give it a bit of push.

Speaker 5 So, that's the first thing. But almost always for every oscillation, there's two forces pushing on something.

Speaker 5 And in the case of the cup, there's kinetic energy that is pushing liquid to the side of the cup once you've started it. And then the other thing is that there's gravitational potential energy.

Speaker 5 So, gravity is pulling it down but the kinetic energy is moving everything to the side and energy switches between those two and the natural frequency depends on how long it takes that balance to switch around and so energy will go from one type of energy to another type of energy and at the same time to make that happen physically it's going from being sloped in the cup to being flat and moving to being sloped up the other side so i think that sort of makes sense in a cup where you've obviously got the constraints of the you know the ceramic on the side but I mean you said everything wobbles I mean does everything have a resonant frequency then even things that are not solid so a resonant frequency is something different everything has a natural frequency unless it's a really squishy spongy blob of jelly and even that probably has a really really faint one pretty much everything so your internal organs will wobble at a certain frequency if you nudge them the bubbles that I study if you pour out water and you hear bubbles going ping ping ping they're oscillating at their natural frequency So almost everything around us does have this natural frequency.

Speaker 5 So if you push it, it will vibrate. But then the resonance thing is one step further.
So I'm always in a hurry.

Speaker 5 When I'm walking down the corridor with my cup of tea, I'm stepping at a certain pace, right? So I'm kind of step, step, step, step.

Speaker 5 And if it happens that my stepping pace exactly matches the natural sloshing of my tea, the sloshes get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and I spill my tea.

Speaker 5 And there is this really inconvenient thing in the the world which is that the rate we happen to walk happens to more or less match the natural frequency of your average mug of tea which means that if you're in a hurry we all spill our tea all the time.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry I just need to clarify.

Speaker 1 I can see the cup of tea, I can see the splashing that's going on, but if you agitate it more, are you saying that those ripples won't go faster, but they'll just get bigger?

Speaker 5 That's right.

Speaker 5 So it's only when the matching comes, so you've got to push it at exactly the rate that it wants to swing anyway, and then even a little push will make it much, much bigger than you would expect.

Speaker 5 So if you were walking along with, if you're one of those people that drinks coffee in tiny, tiny cups, you're not going to spill that because the natural frequency is really, really fast because it's really small.

Speaker 5 It's only when the push that you're getting from your walking is going at exactly the same speed, then a little push gets amplified, basically. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Speaker 5 And that's what a resonance is. An external...

Speaker 5 oscillating force so something that's going push push push push and if that matches up with the natural frequency of the thing, that's when you get a resonance.

Speaker 4 Do we ever use this to our advantage then? So have a known natural frequency of something and then match it externally?

Speaker 5 Yeah, we do it all the time, actually. And of course, we are all in a radio studio.
And at the start of radio shows, people quite often say tune in.

Speaker 5 And actually, what tuning in means is please resonate with me, although I'm not sure most radio engineers think of it like that.

Speaker 5 But you can have lots of different types of resonance. So you can also have an electronic resonance where electrons are oscillating backwards and forwards.

Speaker 5 And of course, we're surrounded by radio waves all the time. There's waves coming and going all the time around us.

Speaker 5 So how does a radio engineer pick out the one frequency or a listener pick out the one frequency that they want? Well, they have a little circuit and that circuit has its natural frequency.

Speaker 5 And you can alter things in the circuit to choose its natural frequency. And then it will only respond.
to the waves going past that are of that frequency.

Speaker 5 So tuning into a radio is quite literally altering your electric circuit so it resonates with the radio station that you want to hit. So, you know, there's lots of resonance going on right now.

Speaker 4 Because the frequencies have to match in order for it to sort of give energy to the amplitude.

Speaker 5 That's right, yes.

Speaker 4 I mean, the example people always use is like pushing a child on a swing, right? That if you manage to get the timing right, you can get the child to go really high.

Speaker 4 And if you get it wrong, well, the swing stops going so high and you push the child off.

Speaker 5 Or they fall off.

Speaker 1 Or they fall off. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's, I guess, what we're talking about here, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, that's right. And resonance is actually very useful.
I was thinking about it today. I was trying to lift a heavy thing up.
You know, it was a sort of heavy bag.

Speaker 5 There wasn't anything valuable in it. And I gave it a bit of a swing.
And you swing your arm back and you swing your arm up.

Speaker 5 And you know that if you put in relatively little effort from yourself, because you're swinging at the natural frequency of your arm as a pendulum, you can swing that up onto the top of a wardrobe or wherever it's meant to go.

Speaker 5 So we're using resonance to help us. because it's a much more efficient way to get things done.

Speaker 4 Do you find this in the natural world? I mean, are there animals who've sort of worked out how to use resonance to their advantage?

Speaker 5 There are, and I mean, I don't think they're thinking about all the physics, but they definitely make it work. So, there are nocturnal spiders that hunt using a web to catch insects.

Speaker 5 And, of course, what a spider wants a web for is that it's going to sit in the middle of the web, and the web is going to catch things, and then the spider can go and get them.

Speaker 5 So, the problem for the spider is how to know when to go and fetch something.

Speaker 5 And so, what these spiders do is they effectively decide on the tension and the thickness of those threads so that they will resonate if an insect is struggling.

Speaker 5 So if an insect gets stuck in the web, it will pretty much be struggling within a known series of frequencies, right? So it's a relatively narrow window.

Speaker 5 So the spiders actually make sure that their spider web threads are resonant with that frequency because then what happens is the insect struggles, the oscillation gets passed very easily down the web to the middle of the spider and the spider goes, oh, time to go and get lunch.

Speaker 4 Does that mean then if you go up to a spider's web, is there a particular frequency you can wobble it at that will?

Speaker 1 You know, you know, I heard this fact when I was a kid. Teacher.
And I've spent my entire life trying to do that.

Speaker 1 Trying to wobble it. Try to wobble a spider's web in order to lure the spider.

Speaker 5 What are you using?

Speaker 1 My finger, obviously, I'm not like, you know, no, I train a fly. Does it work?

Speaker 1 No, I put my big sausage finger in just on the edge of the web and I just wobble it a little bit. Does it work? It never works.
It never works.

Speaker 1 It's been 45 years of trying that it's never ever worked like with it. I don't know what I would do if it did.
Like I would absolutely, especially as a kid, I would have ran screaming.

Speaker 1 If I'd gone and suddenly a spider go, oh, nom, yum, yum, nom, spider comes jumping out.

Speaker 1 I would have run screaming for it, but I have my entire life been trying to lure a spider from the web.

Speaker 4 I strongly suspect the spider would be more scared of your sausage finger than you would be.

Speaker 1 Possibly. Yeah, it's going, oh, I'm not going to have the silk for this.

Speaker 4 Okay, all of these examples, though, so far have been where you just chance upon resonance, or maybe you're using it to your advantage.

Speaker 5 But, I mean, it's not always a useful thing is it no so there's an example of an earthquake that took place in Mexico City in 1985 it was a big earthquake lots of people died and so some engineers went along afterwards and kind of said you know what what can we learn from all of this and there were two things that they observed firstly that the the layers of sediment underneath mexico city had done something very weird so normally earthquake wobbling is really complicated it's lots of different waves at lots of different frequencies all overlapping with each other but in this case the sediment meant that the whole city was basically oscillating at exactly one frequency, which is very unusual in an earthquake.

Speaker 5 Then they noticed that all the buildings lower than five stories high were basically fine. But actually, the buildings higher than 20 stories, they were basically fine too.

Speaker 5 It was the ones between five and 20 stories high that fell down.

Speaker 5 And it turned out that the frequency of the earthquake exactly matched pretty much the natural frequency of a building in that middle range. And so that's why there was a huge amount of destruction.

Speaker 5 But then they looked at the buildings, they looked at the likely earthquake frequencies and they redesigned the buildings so that they wouldn't have that natural frequency.

Speaker 5 And actually, I think it was seven or eight years ago, there was another big earthquake, far, far less destruction. And one of the reasons was that the buildings were not resonant with the earthquake.

Speaker 5 So it does cause problems, but actually knowing about it. it gives you ways to engineer around it.

Speaker 1 I think this is a good time to bring in Vander Lewis, Professor of Structural Engineering at Warwick University. Hello Vander, how are you? Hello.

Speaker 1 Because it interests us a lot how big rigid structures respond to these kind of huge forces.

Speaker 6 Well I love the explanation of resonance with the cup of tea. I would just like to add that every object has got natural frequency and more than one.

Speaker 6 Some have got infinite number of natural frequencies. And designers are capable of finding out about them.

Speaker 1 Okay, so in theory, how would resonance make a bridge for?

Speaker 6 Well, the bigger the object, the more difficult it is to excite it. But people exact fluctuating load on a bridge.

Speaker 6 The vibrations, if the frequency of that matches the frequency, natural frequency of the bridge, it can start growing and eventually will set up stresses.

Speaker 6 And if the stresses exceed the strength of the material, then the structure breaks.

Speaker 1 So it looks like a very rigid thing, a bridge, if energy is being added to it at a particular frequency, which may be unfortunately the frequency at which people walk, that energy can then be being stored in the bridge and the bridge can end up undulating to a point where...

Speaker 6 That's right, yeah, it's the interaction between the fluctuating load and the structure.

Speaker 1 Well, there are many examples that people cite about resonance as a kind of a destructive force. And probably the most famous is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which fell in 1940.

Speaker 1 And the footage is very, very famous of that. Is that an example of resonance?

Speaker 6 With the Tacoma Bridge it was the shape of the deck.

Speaker 6 The side panels of the deck were just flat plates so the exposure to the wind was quite big so the pressure applied by the wind was quite big but with the shape of the flat plate as the wind went over the plate the flow was interrupted so that local turbulence occurred and then you were actually changing the nature of the fluctuating wind and it was those vortices that caused the failure of the bridge.

Speaker 1 Okay so so it's not really. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge is often mentioned as an example of resonance, but it's not really the.

Speaker 6 No, in fact, aerostatians would argue that Tacoma Bridge was not the case of resonance, but aerodynamic flutter, they call it flutter, because you've interfered with the fluctuating load.

Speaker 1 I do feel that in a situation where the wind blows down a bridge, flutter isn't really doing it for me as a term. It seems like a very light and frothy term for the wind that blew down the bridge.

Speaker 1 It's sweet, isn't it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, little birds just fluttering by. Yeah,

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Speaker 1 A famous example closer to home would be the Millennium Bridge, which opened in 2000, connecting St. Paul's to the Tate,

Speaker 1 and then almost immediately began to wobble in a way that people found incredibly scary and was shut down after three days. I mean, again, is this a situation where resonance is a destructive force?

Speaker 6 Well, the problem was the deck is very, very light, made out of aluminium. So it's not too difficult to excite a light structure like that.

Speaker 6 And as you pointed out, as people walked on a bridge, we don't walk like models on a catwalk, putting one foot in front of the other.

Speaker 6 We go sideways, and there will always be a tiny lateral force which combined with a number of people. Not everybody, of course, walked instead, but there will be a few people that did.

Speaker 6 And that was enough to cause this synchronized movement.

Speaker 1 This is not resonance, then? Is this the...

Speaker 6 Well, it was difficult to actually decide looking at the film. So the strict definition of resonance is when the amplitude of displacements grows.

Speaker 6 But I think it was getting greater and greater before they shut the bridge. So yeah, the designers decided to shut the structure.

Speaker 1 Which I also quite like the implication that people were just walking wrong.

Speaker 1 Bring your cat walk walk to the thing. You sachet down here, you turn on point, and then you're back again.
And that's it. That's that's how you properly walk.

Speaker 4 So, have you ever seen the video of soon after the Millennium Bridge opened? It is crazy. It's crazy.
And this bridge was tested, it was up for months and months in advance.

Speaker 4 You know, winter winds, no problem. But as soon as they put people on it, these two effects happened, right? Which is that they matched the resonant frequency of the bridge,

Speaker 4 but as soon as the bridge started swinging backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards, it knocked people onto the same pattern of left, right, left, right.

Speaker 4 Because you're now effectively on a moving platform. Yes.
So the more people that got knocked onto that same frequency, the more the bridge went, and so on and so on and so on.

Speaker 4 I mean, and it is like you would not want to be walking across that bridge. I mean, they closed it after a couple of days, right?

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 Vonda, you spent your life working in the structural engineering of bridges. How do you test for this? For wind, for footsteps, for what's the process?

Speaker 6 At Warwick, we do have testing laboratories and you do test elements of the structure.

Speaker 6 When you're checking a structure, if you can put it into a wind tunnel, small-scale model, and then make a prediction of what the real structure would behave like.

Speaker 1 Is it a case in any of these structures, which we regard as quite rigid, and we like to think of these things as strong and solid, there have to be points where they're soft and they'll absorb forces.

Speaker 1 So that mixture you have to have.

Speaker 6 Yes, I think so.

Speaker 4 Helen, your thoughts on all of this stuff?

Speaker 5 These things are really complicated. And often when these disasters happen, it's because nature was doing things that are slightly more complex than had been anticipated.

Speaker 1 But I mean, we keep talking as if it's a fundamental resonant frequency.

Speaker 1 When you build a bridge, is there a certificate somewhere that says the weight of the bridge is this, the length of the bridge is this, and its resonant frequency is this many hertz?

Speaker 6 Yes, yes, you know that.

Speaker 1 You should know that. Yeah.
Okay. Okay, all right.

Speaker 4 So what I'm getting from this is that yes, you know, bridges can fall down, but really, we're quite good at checking, so probably don't worry about it too much.

Speaker 4 Okay, aside from physical structures, there is another part of the question from our listener, which is about whether we as humans have a resonant frequency.

Speaker 4 And it turns out Southampton University has got a whole department that is dedicated to studying what happens to the body when it's vibrated.

Speaker 4 Phil Moxey is senior research assistant in the human factors unit of the sound and vibration department there. Have a listen to this.

Speaker 9 The Human Factors Research Unit is really interested in one question.

Speaker 9 How do people respond to being vibrated?

Speaker 9 What we do on a day-to-day basis is conduct experiments that look at specific kinds of vibration applied by, you know, boats and trains and, you know, anything that moves and is likely to cause you to move in response and see how the human responds to that from a health perspective, from a performance perspective, and from the perspective of whether we can expect them to have some kind of injury as a result of it.

Speaker 9 So whilst the human body does have a resonant frequency and in fact a series of resonant frequencies, it's not like a bridge or some other big structure where you find this one key frequency and you excite it at it and it suddenly falls apart, right?

Speaker 9 It's a much more complicated system.

Speaker 9 If you think of the human body and like all the bits you've got inside you swirling around, you can kind of think of each one of those as an individual mass connected to everything else in the body by a series of springs and solid interfaces.

Speaker 9 And when you try and excite a system like that, it's very rare that you can find one magic frequency that it suddenly shakes itself to pieces, which for the human body is probably a very good thing.

Speaker 9 What we have for the human body is kind of a broad range where we know that when you excite the human body, those systems tend to move a little bit more.

Speaker 9 And it's a broad range of about 5 Hertz to about 8 Hertz for a person sat in a car seat being like the classic example of where you might experience this.

Speaker 9 Over a long enough time, if you are exposed to this on a daily basis, like for example, a bus driver, a taxi driver, a farmer out on a tractor every day of the week, that can start to cause problems, and in particular, lower back problems and joint problems in general.

Speaker 1 Helen, what do you make of this? Would be surprised if we had a natural frequency?

Speaker 5 I think it's quite nice that humans are complex things and have more than one.

Speaker 5 It does make me think of those massive, great big speakers, though, you know, in massive sound systems that are almost certainly making at least some sounds at frequencies that are too low for us to hear, because our hearing cuts off at about 20 hertz, but we feel them, right?

Speaker 5 We know we can hear music through the floor. So, I guess it's just a different way of hearing.
But as humans, we are so squishy that mostly we are just damping out all the oscillations.

Speaker 5 But the problem is, you know, I guess all that energy is still going into our system somewhere, and some internal soft tissues are taking the strain, and that's not really what they've been evolved for.

Speaker 5 So, we've not had time to, we've not ever had to deal with the consequences of that.

Speaker 4 Can still be quite a nice experience, though. You know, you go to a particular concert and it's like, wow, that song really, really resonated with my liver.

Speaker 4 I think it's time, though, for us to introduce our mystery musical guest for this episode. Senna Vakari is a sound therapy practitioner.

Speaker 4 And Senna, you've bought an array of instruments which are particularly relevant for talking about the resonance of bodies.

Speaker 10 Hello, yes, so I have bought a few different bits from my quite vast collection of sound healing instruments. So we...

Speaker 4 we're did you say sound healing? Yeah. Go on.

Speaker 10 So sound healing is a wellness practice where we use sustained tones and frequencies to induce resonance with different areas of the body to enhance physical health and emotional health primarily through eliciting the relaxation response.

Speaker 4 So you are deliberately trying to make different parts of the body resonate. Yes.
Okay show us your instrument.

Speaker 10 Okay so

Speaker 10 these tuning forks are really nice because they offer a very subtle sound because you'll find people have different preferences. These are nice and gentle.
These can be selected by their frequency.

Speaker 10 So for example, I've got the C note at 256 hertz. If I were to pair that with the D at 384 Hertz, we get what's called the musical interval of the fifth.

Speaker 10 So we just use something to activate the forks with. I'm using a hockey puck here.
So activate the two notes. And we would gently bring this at the ears of a client

Speaker 1 oh that does actually feel quite pleasant well it's a pleasant noise it's a lovely sound it's a nice chord it's like one of the great chords but then if I may

Speaker 10 we would then move into a different interval

Speaker 4 so I this I think that's doing something to me okay

Speaker 1 great you just maybe you're you may have discovered your natural frequency I think I think that's it I think that's a I think that's maybe what I'm saying it's like it sort of feels like the ringing continues in your head see here's my thing they're a lovely sounds.

Speaker 1 Try it.

Speaker 1 I'll try. Okay, Grant, I'll try it.
Okay, fine. I just feel that we're such complex kind of mixes of mushy and hard, I think there wouldn't be one.

Speaker 1 We'd have a number of different things that we'd like in different places, in different parts of the body,

Speaker 1 or would resonate.

Speaker 4 I think it sort of feels different to just listening to a normal sound.

Speaker 10 I like almost compare it to a brain massage because what they actually do, you're introducing a different frequency at each ear. So you begin to feel this sense of harmony.

Speaker 4 There might also be a Pavlov's Dog here thing, though, which is that when you go to a spa, there's often

Speaker 1 you're in

Speaker 1 the zone for this anyway.

Speaker 1 There are lovely sounds, whatever. But I guess that if you're in a meditative state and this is a very calming sound, that would be calming for you, and that would be a pleasant thing to do.

Speaker 10 So, here we are, Darwin.

Speaker 1 It's a lovely experience, isn't it?

Speaker 4 Darwin's reaction didn't really work for the radio,

Speaker 4 but he shrugged his shoulders and kept a completely blank expression.

Speaker 1 It's a lovely sound. I see why it would be a very calming experience.

Speaker 1 I just don't necessarily think, I think we're such massively complicated things that it'd be very difficult to make a prediction from outside of what's going to actually

Speaker 1 create an effect within the body, like a measurement. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 We also presumably have different natural frequencies for different people because this is something that's dependent on size, dependent on structure, etc.

Speaker 1 I think, yeah, I mean, because look, physically, me in comparison to you, Hannah, I'd like a bigger tuning fork.

Speaker 1 I mean, how big do these tuning forks get?

Speaker 1 Very, very.

Speaker 4 A massive gong in the corner.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, you have gongs, you have gongs.

Speaker 10 I have got massive gongs at home, but I was only able to carry in a baby one time.

Speaker 1 Okay, fine.

Speaker 4 But I mean, there are a couple of studies that demonstrate that this kind of therapy can change people's moods or improve people's moods.

Speaker 10 The literature around this is definitely expanding and becoming more into the mainstream realm.

Speaker 6 So if you believe it's going to help you, let's just say 30% of feeling is due to placebo. If you believe it's going to help you, it's going to help you.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, you're holding a gong in front of us. I'm sorry, are we all waiting to hear the gong? I want to hear the gong.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so a little bit awkward to place it in down, but I'll try my best. This is probably more for you.

Speaker 1 I think. Oh, thank you.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 It was lovely.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's lovely. I don't know if those stuff was happening.
Who knows?

Speaker 1 I know you're right. But

Speaker 1 it's still a very pleasant thing to hear it.

Speaker 4 Kind of ancient therapy about this, you know?

Speaker 1 There is a reason that gongs are like a huge part of certain cultures that signals the opening or the closing of prayer or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I suppose that. Wow, really? Did you have? We would just shout at that.

Speaker 4 Ancient China

Speaker 4 said, Hey, I'm in Cambridge now. So

Speaker 4 you gotta get used to the gong.

Speaker 1 No, I'm more used to it, like an Irish mammy going, dinner now, geez, it's not getting any warmer. That was our gong.

Speaker 4 That's there's not a resonant frequency to that one,

Speaker 1 but it had an effect.

Speaker 1 Deep down,

Speaker 4 there's one over here as well that I'm desperate to see.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so this one is an alchemy crystal bowl. So it is made like 99.9% pure quartz, so more of an ethereal, lighter sort of sound, I think, than the gong.

Speaker 4 Oh, it's still going.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a cool sound wave, isn't it? That's really, really amazing.

Speaker 4 That's the quartz presumably, which has this, you know, vibrational property.

Speaker 1 Just for people who can't see, you're no longer doing this. You stopped doing that about a minute and a half ago.
And it's still... We're still going.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 And this one really drops people into that meditative state very quickly.

Speaker 4 I just want to do an um, you know?

Speaker 4 Amazing.

Speaker 1 Do you feel calmer? I know, I'm at work.

Speaker 1 So, you know, I'm kind of very much focused. Not the place to really get into the zone on it, like whatever, but as a general thing, I can see why it's a lovely, it's a lovely experience.
Very much.

Speaker 1 That in itself is a thing that makes people feel better.

Speaker 4 Hard agree. Hard agree.
Well, thank you so much to our guests in the studio: Helen Czersky, Vander Lewis, Philip Moxley, and Senna Bakari.

Speaker 1 How are your vibes after that?

Speaker 1 I mean, are you like in a zone? Are you...

Speaker 4 Is that what vibes means?

Speaker 1 Yeah, vibes are short for vibrations. No, it's not.
It literally is. Good vibrations by the beach boys.
Vibes is vibrations. Did you know that? I did.

Speaker 1 Because I didn't know that either for a long time.

Speaker 1 So the whole notion of there being kind of a human vibration, that's been around for a long time. People have been talking that for a long time.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 1 since the 1960s. Since the 1960s at least, yeah.
And they probably maybe even predate that.

Speaker 4 I reckon if you ask anyone in ancient China, I think they would say they cared quite a lot about it, I think.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I did advance you with a gong.

Speaker 1 That would have settled the issue there and then.

Speaker 4 Oh, do you know what? We should have borrowed a gong so we can use it for the end of the show.

Speaker 4 Nothing announces that something is finished, quite like a gong.

Speaker 1 That's ironic because the gong itself never seems to end.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's no better metaphor for the show. You know, once it starts, it just goes on and on and on.

Speaker 1 If you want to be notified as soon as a new episode is released, make sure you're subscribed to Curious Cases on BBC Sounds and have push notifications turned on.

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Speaker 11 Pig out on evil animals in the Evil Genius podcast feed first on BBC Sounds.

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