[Dixielandjazz] The Mysterious B Flat - From NPR

[Steve Barbone]

Note that Alligators hate Bb, etc. And that the Bb emanating from the black
hole in the Perseus cluster does not come from  the black hole itself, but
from the gasses surrounding the hole.

Though not in the below quotes from NPR, it is said that more people will
sound a B Flat, than any other note, when asked to hum a random note.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Morning Edition, February 16, 2007 · For reasons that remain mostly
mysterious, the note we call B flat does the oddest things.

B Flats and Alligators

During World War II, the New York Philharmonic was visiting the American
Museum of Natural History. During rehearsal, somebody played a note that
upset a resident live alligator named Oscar. Oscar, who'd been in the museum
on 81st Street, suddenly began to bellow. Naturally, with so many scientists
in residence, an experiment was quickly devised to see how to get Oscar to
bellow again. Various musicians ‹ string, percussive and brass ‹ were
brought to Oscar to play various notes. It turned out the culprit was B
flat, one octave below middle C. The experiment was described back in the
1940s. I repeated the experiment on an ABC News broadcast in the 1990s,
playing a B flat to a collection of gators at a roadside attraction in
Florida and recording their bellows.

Why B flat? You'd have to ask an alligator.


B Flat and Glenway Fripp the Piano Tuner

Jay Alison (of This I Believe fame) and radio correspondent Viki Merrick
live in Massachusetts and help run public radio stations on Cape Cod,
Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. In their capacities as
managers-poets-reporters in residence, they regularly devise short
promotional "moments" featuring local personalities. One of their promos
described a trip that Glenway Fripp took up a staircase.  Mr. Fripp, a piano
tuner by trade, was humming in B flat while climbing the stairs at his dad's
office building, when he noticed that his hum had somehow escaped him and
was hanging, resonating without him, on the staircase landing. He couldn't
quite explain what was happening; only that his hum (and it was definitely
his hum, no one else's) had gone off without him. If you listen to the
broadcast, you can hear this for yourself. Viki Merrick recorded it. Glenway
has no idea why B flat had this particular property on that particular
staircase. He suspects that the walls were porous and may even contain
cavities that are very B-flat friendly. That's all he knows. But the truth
is, he doesn't have an explanation.


B Flat and Black Holes

In September 2003, astronomers at NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory found
what can be described as sound waves emanating from a supermassive black
hole. The black hole can be seen in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located
250 million light years from Earth.

Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, analyzed
the waves and announced, "We have detected their soundŠ." The sound he found
(which is really the waves passing through gas near the black hole)
translate to the note B flat.

But this is not a B flat you or I can hear. It is 57 octaves below middle C.
A piano, by comparison, contains only seven octaves. So if a black hole
hums, it hums at a frequency a million billion times lower than you can
hear.