Co-Builder of the last two in Montreal here, actually the octobass shown in the article is incomplete, it lacks the pedals that are present on the original one by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. These pedals allows for legato, which is not achievable if you play only with the levers.
About those in Montreal, one of them is a replica (+ minor upgrades) of the original one, and two of them are driven with motors.
Yes, definitely plan to spend a few hours - it's a massive museum packed with musical instruments and cultures from around the world. They give you positional-aware headsets that play music and information as you near a display.
Serious question - why else do I want to go to Phoenix? Say enough for a long weekend. I keep hearing good things about this museum but Phoenix is too far away for me to go just for this.
Skip to 5:41 to hear it actually played. Although I assume you'd need very good speakers and I'm not sure if the YT audio compression is good for very low tones.
I can't speak for YouTube's specific compression, but since there's less information in low frequency sounds they should compress better than high frequency sounds.
Anecdata: the bass in low bitrate online drum and bass radio in the 2000s always came through cleaner than the mids and treble.
Where "sort of" depends on your personal answer to "does spending 15 minutes recording yourself making various noises with it, then editing the clips together count as "playing"?".
For years, a friend of mine (in San Francisco) and I (in New York City) have sent one another an image [1] of one of these being tuned any time we’re doing coast-to-coast software debugging (especially relevant when we were working on a realtime collaborative text editor).
Kinda funny, my son recently started playing both guitar and bass guitar and quickly got into building them. He mashed up a Ukulele with a fretless Guitar and put two bridges on the Guitar so it has a harp section. Just before this got posted he came around and asked me about the physics of building an (electric) bass guitar tuned an octave or two octaves lower than a normal bass guitar.
“Some of the instruments fall below the human hearing range, only the vibrations can be felt,” feels unreal to me for some reason. I can’t imagine a vibration rattling through me without hearing something at that power.
It's used to rattle more than just humans with processes like DFAT [0]. Here's the NASA handbook on their use [1].
For experiences that are a little more human friendly, subsonic audio is something that's also explored more commonly in the noise art. Stefanie Egedy [2] is one artist that's been working in that space lately.
Apparently this is a thing that was used in old horror movies.
Subsonic music would play just before a scary encounter, creating a feeling of uneasiness to the audience without any consciously perceptible stimulous, and thus priming the audience for the horror to come.
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About those in Montreal, one of them is a replica (+ minor upgrades) of the original one, and two of them are driven with motors.
You can see some close up in [1]
[1] https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2024/08/14/irez-vous-voir-...
Wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone in Phoenix.
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[1] https://www.gakkihaku.jp/en/
They actually have three. https://www.osm.ca/en/octobasses/
Anecdata: the bass in low bitrate online drum and bass radio in the 2000s always came through cleaner than the mids and treble.
https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/
[1] https://www.loc.gov/item/2014714519/
For experiences that are a little more human friendly, subsonic audio is something that's also explored more commonly in the noise art. Stefanie Egedy [2] is one artist that's been working in that space lately.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-field_acoustic_testing
[1]: https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/NASA-HDBK...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Yo2hcSAbc
Subsonic music would play just before a scary encounter, creating a feeling of uneasiness to the audience without any consciously perceptible stimulous, and thus priming the audience for the horror to come.