A couple years ago I sent a piece I made to a friend where I was using feedback in Ableton, sending the return tracks back onto itself and creating a composition out of that. She told me it reminded her of this guy called Thomas Ankersmit, I didn’t know about his work at that time, but I checked his performances out and feel in love with the way he interacted with the serge modular.
I had the pleasure of watching him perform a couple weeks ago, it was a lovely performance, very physical. Usually with modular you use lots of modulations to keep the sound moving, but he was using his hands more than cv, it was beautiful the way the interacted with the feedback, he was completely in control of it and using it in an emotive manner.
There was a point of the performance that lasted about 5 minutes, where he had this resonating feedback drone at an extremely high frequency, and he slowly pushed it louder and louder until it reached a point that I started to hear a new frequency that sounded like it came from inside my head, the more intense it got I felt like my eardrums were about to pop. I enjoy the first couple minutes but I got a bit unbearable by the end, regretting not carrying my ear plugs.
Regardless, It was a beautiful performance and opened my ears to the possibly of otoacoustic emissions.
When I heard my ear producing a new frequency it was not a psychoacoustic trick, I was actually a frequency resonating by the smalls hairs in my ear. You can actually record this frequency if you place a microphone besides your ear. Its like a filter when it starts to self resonate when the resonance is pushed too high.
Maybe this is something I would like to research into in the future.