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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Richard Mainwaring, "What the Ear Hears (And Doesn't): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency" (Sourcebooks, 2022)
Description: What do the world's loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common?
In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea began to shake uncontrollably without warning and was immediately evacuated. Was it an earthquake? An attack? No one seemed quite sure. The actual cause emerged later and is utterly fascinating: Twenty-three middle-aged folks were having a Tae Bo fitness class in the office gym on the twelfth floor. Their beats had inadvertently matched the building's natural frequency, and this coincidence--harnessing a basic principle of physics--caused the building to shake at an alarming...