Seeing how Wraith got such nice help with his question, I thought I'd try you guys on something that's been bugging me since I was 6.
When I close my eyelids really hard, I hear a rumbling sound in my ears. It amplifies if I'm under water.
When I was 6, deep deep down I nurtured some hope that it was the Force. It sounds exactly like the Force-sound when Vader nipped that overconfident officer in ANH.
Anyone got a clue?
Posted by Cartmaniac (Member # 256) on :
I believe what you hear is the wobbly vibration of your tympanic membranes (alright, your eardrums, dammit) caused by involuntary muscle contraction, but that's probably not a 100% accurate diagnosis.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
You're really flexing muscles located above your jawbone and kinda behind your ears. You should be able to do this without closing your eyes. What this does is slightly constrict the ear canal, but aside from un-popping your ears on a flight, I can find no purpose for it. Mabye it closes thte membrane in your inner ear that prevents water from entering when you swim.
Or it's really the Force....but I would'nt try that "feather fall" trick just yet. Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :
When you squeeze your eyelids, the midichlorians are screaming in pain. The more midichlorians, the more screaming, and the more powerful is the force, young Padawan.
I can notice the same rumbling if I hold my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut. When you do that, you are contracting a lot of facial muscles, as well as jaw muscles. I think it has something to you with muscle contractions or maybe blood circulation increasing. If you put your index fingers in your ears and then clench your fists (without pushing your fingers in deeper), the rumbling also gets louder.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Wow, that's true. I don't need to push my fingers deeper, they are just the conductor for the hands. So muscle activity makes sounds, that's the first time I got conclusive evidence of that. Cool.
True, Jason, I can do the thing without closing the lids. I used to assume the sound came from the ear canals because they were being compressed, but in reality it was the mere flexing of the muscles in the head that created the sound.
I wonder if Lucas had this thing in mind when he decided what characteristics would be added when displaying the Force in his movies. Could it be that he added the rumbling sound, that first time in the Death Star Briefing Raum, because 1: Vader made a cerebral action and we would on some subconscious level relate to the sound being made by him as we've heard it in our own heads when we "flex", 2: because it took more effort of Vader, rather than just reading someone's mind he strangled a man.
This has been a bit unevenly represented in the Star Wars Hexogy, I think. Come to think of it, has the rumbling been present any other time in the SW-movies?
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
And another thing, closing my jaw muscles hard [i]doesn't produce any sound. Could they be insulated in some way, so that we might eat in peace?
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Nim exclaimed:
quote: So muscle activity makes sounds, that's the first time I got conclusive evidence of that. Cool.
Sorry to burst your bubble there Nim - I did the clenching-fists-while-fingers-in-each-ear-trick... Is the sound of blood turbulence... It sounds like that when you are listening to the interruption and release of blood in the brachial artery in the arm (through a stethoscope) - when you are taking blood pressure.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Exclaimed, did I? :-) You've destroyed my life's work in seconds. No matter, this explanation is even funkier.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
hee hee - well I thought it was a bit less boring than 'said'.
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