Sounds in popular culture

In order to substantiate the claim made in the Meghan Trainor song that it’s ‘All About That Bass,’ a paper reports the result of a calculation of the velocity that humans would have to travel at for their de Broglie wavelengths to be in the range of bass sound frequencies. They assume base frequencies to be in the range 20-200 Hz and calculated that, for average masses, men would need to travel at 2.9x10^-42 ms^-1 and women at 3.5x10^-43 ms^-1 meaning that, contrary to the song’s claim, lighter people are more about the bass than their heavier counterparts.

The same author, in a separate paper, presents an analysis of the “feasibility of using screams to meet the energy requirements of Great Britain” based on the energy generation method used in the film Monsters, Inc. The researcher measured the intensity of a scream as 8 Wm-2 and concluded that screams are not a viable means of meeting the country’s energy needs.