The Mexicali Brass were apparently created by Crown Records, a subsidiary of the Bihari Brothers’ Modern Records, in order to cash in on the popularity of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass and The Baja Marimba Band during the 1960s.

Teddy Phillips, the band’s leader, graduated from Oak Park River High School, where he had learned to play the sax in school band. After graduation, he toured with many bands and also worked in radio studio bands for both NBC and CBS

He formed his own band in 1944, the Teddy Phillips Orchestra, which played at local Chicago clubs until 1947, when he played the Aragon Ballroom. The band was a fixture there and at the Trianon and Willowbrook Ballrooms became the best known band in town. Curiously, his popularity came just as the Big Bands era was closing.

By the 1960s, he had transformed the band into the Mexicali Brass, a Las Vegas style Mariachi Band. During the 1970s, he continued performing with the band, and toured the USA briefly.



Cymatic therapy is a scientifically unsupported alternative medicine technique using acoustic waves which was developed in the 1960s by Sir Peter Guy Manners. It is based on the assumption that human cells, organs, and tissues have each a natural resonant frequency which changes when perturbed by illness.

Starting in the sixth century BC, Greek philosopher Pythagoras was the first to use music to heal a person’s body and emotions. During the eighth century, German scientist Ernst Chladni proved that sound does affect matter. Chlandi, the father of acoustics showed that as he drew a bow across the edge of a metal plate covered with sand, the sand moved and formed geometric patterns.

Cymatic therapists apply different audible frequencies and combinations of sound waves which they claim entrain malfunctioning components back to their healthy vibratory state and promote natural healing. The operational principle of cymatic therapy is out of step with mainstream scientific thought, and it is viewed with skepticism by most medical doctors. Relying on this type of treatment alone, and avoiding or delaying conventional medical care, may have serious health consequences.

Cymatic therapy is operationally, historically, and philosophically distinct from the many medical uses of ultrasound and from the more mainstream practice of music therapy.


Comfort noise is artificial background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the silence in a transmission resulting from voice activity detection or from the audio clarity of modern digital lines.

Some modern telephone systems such as wireless and VoIP use voice activity detection, a form of squelching where low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In digital audio transmissions, this saves bandwidth of the communications channel by transmitting nothing when the source volume is under a certain threshold, leaving only louder sounds such as a speaker’s voice to be sent. However, improvements in background noise reduction technologies can occasionally result in the complete removal of all noise.

The result of receiving total silence, especially for a prolonged period, has a number of unwanted effects on the listener, including the following:

  • The listener may believe that the transmission has been lost, and therefore hang up prematurely.
  • The speech may sound choppy and difficult to understand.
  • The sudden change in sound level can be jarring to the listener.


In modern VoIP products, users may control whether they want comfort noise enabled or disabled. During the siege of Leningrad in 1942, the beat of a metronome was used as comfort noise on the Leningrad radio network, indicating that the network was still functioning.



The acoustical illusion can be constructed by creating a series of overlapping ascending or descending scales. Similar to the Penrose stairs optical illusion, as in M. C. Escher’s lithograph Ascending and Descending, or a barber’s pole.

As an example, consider a brass trio consisting of a trumpet, a horn, and a tuba. They all start to play a repeating C scale in their respective ranges, i.e. they all start playing Cs, but their notes are all in different octaves. When they reach the G of the scale, the trumpet drops down an octave, but the horn and tuba continue climbing. They’re all still playing the same pitch class, but at different octaves. When they reach the B, the horn similarly drops down an octave, but the trumpet and tuba continue to climb, and when they get to what would be the second D of the scale, the tuba drops down to repeat the last seven notes of the scale. So no instrument ever exceeds an octave range, and essentially keeps playing the exact same seven notes over and over again. But because two of the instruments are always “covering” the one that drops down an octave, it seems that the scale never stops rising.


Although it is difficult to recreate the illusion with acoustic instruments, James Tenney, who worked with Roger Shepard at Bell Labs in the early 1960s, created a piece utilizing this effect, For Ann. The piece, in which up to twelve closely but not quite consistently spaced computer-generated sine waves rise steadily from an A pitched below audibility to an A above, fading in, and back out, of audible volume, was then scored for twelve string players. The effect of the electronic work consists both of the Shepard scale, seamless endlessly rising glissandos, and of a shimmering caused by the highest perceivable frequency and the inability to focus on the multitude of rising tones. Tenney has also proposed that the piece be revised and realized so that all entrances are timed in such a way that the ratio between successive pitches is the golden ratio, which would make each lower first-order combination tone of each successive pair coincide with subsequently spaced, lower, tones.

An independently discovered version of the Shepard tone appears at the beginning and end of the 1976 album A Day At The Races by the band Queen. The piece consists of a number of electric-guitar parts following each other up a scale in harmony, with the notes at the top of the scale fading out as new ones fade in at the bottom. Echoes, a 23-minute song by Pink Floyd, concludes with a rising Shepard tone. The Shepard tone is also featured in the fading piano outro to A Last Straw, from Robert Wyatt’s 1974 opus Rock Bottom.




Sufferers often feel a sense of fear and anxiety after an attack, accompanied by elevated heart rate. Attacks are also often accompanied by perceived flashes of light (when perceived on their own, known as a “visual sleep start”) or difficulty in breathing. It is not thought to be dangerous, although it is sometimes distressing to experience.

The cause of the exploding head syndrome is not known, though some physicians have reported a correlation with stress or extreme fatigue. The condition may develop at any time during life and women suffer from it slightly more often than men. Attacks can be one-time events, or can recur.

The mechanism is also not known, though possibilities have been suggested. One is that it may be the result of a sudden movement of a middle ear component or of the eustachian tube. Another is that it may be the result of a form of minor seizure in the temporal lobe where the nerve cells for hearing are located. Electroencephalograms recorded during actual attacks show unusual activity only in some sufferers, and have ruled out epileptic seizures as a cause.

This syndrome can also cause the sufferer to feel an extreme rush or adrenaline kick going through his or her head, sometimes multiple times. In most cases, it occurs when they are in a state between asleep and awake. Some sufferers report familiarisation with the subsequent fear or panic element such that they no longer consciously experience it.

Symptoms may be resolved spontaneously over time. It may be helpful to reassure the patient that this symptom is harmless. Clomipramine has been used in three patients, who experienced immediate relief from this condition.


Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. It investigates properties such as the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and to abstract linguistic concepts like phrases and utterances.

The study of acoustic phonetics was greatly enhanced in the late 19th century by the invention of the Edison phonograph. The phonograph allowed the speech signal to be recorded and then later processed and analyzed. By replaying the same speech signal from the phonograph several times, filtering it each time with a different filter, a spectrogram or graphic image of the speech recording could be created.

A series of papers by Ludimar Hermann investigated the spectral properties of vowels and consonants using the Edison phonograph, and it was in these papers that the term formant was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel recordings made with the Edison phonograph at different speeds in an effort to distinguish between varying theories of vowel production.

Further advances in acoustic phonetics were made possible by the development of the telephone industry. During World War II, work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories greatly facilitated the systematic study of the spectral properties of periodic and aperiodic speech sounds, vocal tract resonances and vowel formants, voice quality and prosody.

On a theoretical level, acoustic phonetics advanced greatly when it became clear that speech acoustics could be modeled in a way analogous to electrical circuits. During the early 1900s, Lord Rayleigh was among the first to recognize that the new electric theory could be used in acoustics, but it was not until 1941 that the circuit model was effectively used. In 1952, the book Preliminaries to Speech Analysis was published, tying acoustic phonetics and phonological theory together. This was followed in 1960 by Gunnar Fant’s Acoustic Theory of Speech Production, which has remained the major theoretical foundation for speech acoustic research in both the academy and industry.


The gudastviri is a droneless, double chantered, horn belled bagpipe played in the Caucasus region between Europe and Asia. The word comes from the words guda (bag) and stviri (whistling). In some regions, the instrument is called the chiboni, stviri, or tulumi.

It is made up of two parts, the first being a whole sheep or goat skin, or a sewed, rectangular leather bag (“guda”). The second is a yoked double chant pipe (“stviri”), terminating in a single horn bell, which makes the gudastviri a member of the hornpipe class of bagpipes.


Traditionally, only men play this instrument, and Rachian gudastviri players were strolling musicians, who were welcomed as guests at every family party or wedding. It was a profession that served as the main source of the player’s income. Gudastviri players often took part in the Georgian improvisation competition known as berikaoba, where they had to invent a witty epic, lyrical or comical poem accompanied with gudastviri music.

In the region of eastern Javakheti, gudastviri pipes are made of very young branches of a dog rose. One should possess special knowledge to design it. Jewelers are hired to make ornaments on the instrument. The gudastviri itself is nomally designed by the player. The player’s tastes and preferences determine where and how the ornaments should be attached.



A tromba marina or marine trumpet is a triangular bowed string instrument used in medieval and Renaissance Europe that was highly popular in the 15th century in England and survived into the 18th century. The tromba marina consists of a body and neck in the shape of a truncated cone resting on a triangular base. It is usually four to seven feet long and is a monochord, although some versions have sympathetically vibrating strings. It is played without stopping the string, but playing natural harmonics by lightly touching the string with the thumb at nodal points. Its name comes from its trumpetlike sound due to the unusual construction of the bridge.

During the time of Michael Praetorius in 1618, the length of the Trummscheit was 7′ 3″ and the three sides at the base measured 7″, tapering to 2″ at the neck. There was at first only one string, generally a D cello string. The heavy bow, similar to that of the cello, is used between the highest positions of the left hand at the nodal points and the nut of the head. In one catalogued example the frets are lettered A, D, F, A, D, F, G, A, B, C, D.

The body of the tromba marina is generally either three slats of wood joined in an elongated pyramid shape with a pegbox at the apex, or a body of three to six ribs, a frontal soundboard, and a distinguishable neck. In most cases the bottom end of the instrument is open. Some historical models use sound holes. The single string is tuned to the D three octaves below middle C. It attaches at the soundboard and passes over one foot of the bridge, leaving the other foot to vibrate freely on a plate of ivory or glass set into the soundboard creating a brassy buzz.

From its curiously irregular shape, the bridge is also known as the shoe. It is thick and high at the one side on which rests the string, and low and narrow at the other which is left loose so that it vibrates against the belly with every movement of the bow. A string called a guidon is tied around the playing string below the bridge and runs up to the pegbox where it is wrapped around a peg. The guidon adjusts the balance of the bridge by pulling the playing string.


In Germany, at the time when the tromba marina was extensively used in the churches, nuns often substituted the tromba marina because women were not allowed to play trumpets. In France, the Grande Ecurie du Roi comprised five tromba marina among the band in 1662, when the charge was mentioned for the first time in the accounts. The instrument fell into disuse during the first half of the 18th century, and was only to be seen in the hands of itinerant and street musicians. In modern times, the group Corvus Corax still regularly plays the tromba marina.










The Pacific Tree Frog is a very common species of chorus frog, with a range from the West Coast of the United States to British Columbia in Canada. Living anywhere from sea level up to over 11,000 feet. They live in many types of habitats and reproduce in aquatic settings.


The evolutionary history of these frogs is a very interesting one that has recently been changed to better suit tree frogs. Amphibians themselves are thought to have descended from the lobe finned bony fishes. These fishes had an ossified skeleton and emerged from the water as they developed limb girdles and terrestrial characteristics such as lungs and a neck. It is hard to figure out an exact frog lineage because of the lack of fossil record. The habitat in which these animals lived was moist and decay was quick, which was not helpful in preserving biological clues.

The genus appeared just after the dinosaurs went extinct. They originated in South America and expanded to the north into Mexico and eventually into North America. There was then a rise in sea level and the connection between the northern and southern populations was gone. They have been separate ever since and have become genetically distinct from one another.


Pacific tree frogs are most common on the pacific coast of California. They are also found eastward to Montana and Nevada. They love water, but they can also be found upland from ponds, streams, lakes. Their habitat consists of a wide variety of climate and vegetation from sea level to high altitudes. The tree frog makes its home in riparian habitat as well as woodlands, grassland, chaparral, pasture land, and urban areas including back yard ponds.



These frogs are the most common frogs on the west coast of North America. Although the Pacific Tree Frog remains abundant and most populations of tree frogs appear healthy, there is some evidence of declines. The cause has not been fully understood, but pollution, the introduction of exotic species and habitat loss are very high on the list of factors. Some ways to stop amphibian declines are by respecting and protecting amphibian habitat as well as supporting laws and legislation that help to do this. Another important way is to help limit pollutants that will end up in amphibian habitat, usually from agriculture and urban run off, by boycotting companies who are heavy pesticide users and by not pouring chemicals or pollutants down storm drains or in amphibian habitat.