IlmFeed
A video purporting to show how music and the call to prayer affects the body has gone viral. It has been shared across social media including messaging services such as WhatsApp.
The video starts with an unidentified man playing music and pointing to graphics displayed on a goniometer claiming that this is how music affects the “the water, the minerals and the salts in the body”.
He then plays the call to prayer and claims it has an opposite effect on the body.
Whilst it’s true that the call to prayer does have a calming effect the claims in this video are not true.
It’s in fact to do with whether the audio is stereo or mono. Several people have left comments on social media pointing to the fact that it’s fake.
Nasar Ishfaq wrote:
“The graph you see is called a Goniometer (he says it at the start of the video). The graph shows a 2D map of an audio recording, it allows audio-editors to balance the left and right channels of the sound to produce Stereo sound – that’s why on some files the graph produced a elipse.
Mono audio files produce a straight line and appear as almost silent on the graph as the audio is not using right and left channels and so is in perfect balance.
It has NOTHING to do with the sound itself only the way it was recorded.”
Joshua Surreal wrote:
“This is a stereo analyzer, The graph your seeing doesn’t even show any sort of frequency, It shows the stereo image of an audio clip.”
Hafiz Hanif tried it himself:
“Downloaded and installed a Goniometer, searched and download an Athan audio, made sure it was a stereo file, and ran the audio in the Goniometer. The wave was everywhere.”
Simon showed a live demo through Facebook live to prove it wrong:
So the moral of the story? Don’t believe everything you hear or see on the internet. If you are not sure, ask an expert – in this case, sound engineers. You can also send us an email and we’ll check for you.
Let’s remember the following statement of the Prophet:
Abu Huraira narrated the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said: “It is enough to call a person a liar that he narrates everything he hears” [Sahih Muslim]
The explanation of the hadith is that a person will hear a mixture of truth and falsehood and if they simply narrate everything without checking what is true and what is false, they will inevitably narrate the lies too.
