Ultimately, all sound that we perceive is psychoacoustic. As soon as sound passes through the ears, it stops being a physical phenomena and becomes a matter of perception. What we hear is almost by rule different from what is actually sounding, due to the peculiarities and limitations of our hearing.
And what we hear can largely differ from what we think we are listening to, due to the many tricks that perception plays on our awareness.
Therefore, if we consider sound as a form of communication, it’s hard not to think that psychoacoustics must be playing a major role in it. According to the author Joseph DeVito, there are 5 stages of listening :
We receive the sound, then making a space in our head for it (understanding), evaluating it by deciding wether we like it or not, subsequently remembering and responding to it.
3 modes of listenings:
- Casual listening – everyday listening, sounds of nature and surroundings
- Semantic listening – integrates higher level notions of meaning and interpretation. listening mode, used by both Huron and Tuuri, refer to associating a sound to the action that created the sound. Such actions are generally linked to clear interactions and motion between objects (e.g., a stick hitting a cymbal).
- Reduced listening – listening to the sound itself, its qualities, abstract listening without putting as meaning into it.
Below graphs are from the work on multimodal listening hypothesis by Kai Tuuri, Manne-Sakari Mustonen, Antti Pirhonen(2010)
To assert cognition, we immediately apply judgment. We determine what is beautiful, immediately implying that all else is ugly, for we want only that one thing. We celebrate something as good, immediately determining that all else is shortcoming and bad, because we want only the good.
Is it wrong, then, to have this desire for what we consider complimentary, to make a judgment about what is before us? The first and essential point is that this process is not cognition or perception, it is judgment.
Tao te ching (ancient Chinese text, lit.meaning “the way of integrity“-roughly), observes this cascade of duality that comes from a primordial assertion of consciousness: what is difficult is so perceived to be, making it subjective, pertinent to one person. As a consensus grows, based on the behavior of groups, societies and cultures, then power asserts itself among the few or among a class. “Difficult” is now what culture and power decide, as is “easy”.
Deep Listening is listening to everything all the time, and reminding yourself when you’re not. But going below the surface too, it’s an active process. – Pauline Oliveros
Harmonic and Difference Tones
Harmonics and Difference TonesThe continuity of beats and tones reveals itself once more when we explore the world of harmonics and subharmonics. If two or more tones have a harmonic relation (i.e. they relate to a common fundamental tone 2F, 3F, 4F, 5F, etc.) they produce a spectrum of overtones that completes this harmonic series. A harmonic spectrum is an acoustical phenomena tha tcan be measured, but in most cases it is not perceived. What we perceive instead is aspecific timbre, the color of the tone, that is very hard to distinguish as separate from the actual tone. A powerful example of making overtones and undertones in the spectrum explicitly heard is the example of modern overtone singing by vocalists Mark van Tongeren and Rollin Rachele or Tuvan throat singing.
Phantom Voices
The appearance of a phantom voice can be traced to the Eastern ritual of the Cuncordo de Castelsardo, a brotherhood on the Island of Sardinia. A choir of four brothers evoke a fifthvoice, the quintina. This higher female voice is said to be the spirit of the Holy Virgin Mary. As Mark van Tongeren recently wrote in his PhD, “At a certain moment my attention was distracted by a female voice that joined the choir. I instantly turned around, because the voice did not come from them, but sounded behind me. Of course there was no woman insight. Flabbergasted I turned back my head and focused on the four singing brothers. Iconcluded that this very real voice must have come from them. She arose from the fusion of their four voices. After about 18 years of experience with overtone singing and listening experiments all over the world I thought to have a blind faith in my ears. Until I turned myhead in an impulse, and for that moment really believed hearing this female voice and I wanted to see her”.
Time Differences
Instead of one voice perceived as the composite of many voices, like the quintina, one voice might be perceived as decomposed into many voices. A classic example is Steve Reich’s 1966 tape piece “Come Out” where a single speech recording is unraveled step by step into individual noises and beats. To achieve this, Reich applies a constant shifting of inter-aural time differences: differences in phase of the sound between the left and the right ear. In the 1960s, this wassimply achieved by changing the individual speeds of the left and right tape loops.As an introduction we hear the original voice recording in balanced stereo. “I had to, like open the bruise up and let some of the blues blood come out to show them.” Then a sample of this voice is looped and starts to phase slowly from the right to the left ear. “Come out to show them.” The phase difference increases until the voice appears to split up in two distinguish able voices on the left and the right.
Binaural Hearing
The phase differences between the two ears is one of the aspects that make up our binaural hearing. Localization of sound originates in the fact that the ears are somedistance apart and, as such, the brain always registers slight differences in phase, intensityand spectrum of the sound striking each ear.In “Gwely Mernans” from Aphex Twin’s Drukqs, we can hear low beatings and high tones wavering around the head by use of shifting time and level differences between the two ears.
Monaural Cancellation
An interesting concept that takes the binaural nature of sound perception to the extreme is Ryoji Ikeda’s “Data.Googolplex.”
This sound piece consists in large part of two symmetrical inverse waveforms presented to the left and the right ear.Upon listening in headphones or on stereo speakers, the piece will in fact appear to be inmono. But the psychoacoustic secret hidden in “Data.Googolplex” is that if the twowaveforms are actually played in mono, it results in a complete cancellation of the sound. Ifsound waves are exactly in phase, they add up to a wave with double amplitude. But ifwaves are symmetrically out of phase, they cancel each other out, as the addition of thehigh curve of the wave with an equally low curve of the wave results in zero wave.
Aftersound
If the image has a weight for the eyes that leaves an impression, and that weight is counterbalanced by the afterimage, a sound is counterbalanced by its aftersound.
Play one note or sound unamplified and listen to the aftersound, whilstlistening ask yourself the following questions:•Is there an echo or reverberations continuing the sound after theaudio artifact has been sounded?• What is the impression left on the ensuing silence by the sound andwhat kind of weight, colour or texture does it have?• At what point does the silence lose this impression and change quality?• Where is the end of the aftersound?
Sound induced phobias
Misophonia is a disorder in which certain sounds trigger emotional or physiological responses that some might perceive as unreasonable given the circumstance. Those who have misophonia might describe it as when a sound “drives you crazy.”
Hyperacusis is a type of reduced tolerance to sound. People with hyperacusis often find ordinary noises too loud, while loud noises can cause discomfort and pain. The most common known causes of hyperacusis are exposure to loud noise, and ageing. There are no tests for diagnosing hyperacusis.
Phonophobia, ligyrophobia and sonophobia (often used interchangeably) are defined as a persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of sound. Often, these are normal environmental sounds (e.g., traffic, kitchen sounds, doors closing, or even loud speech) that cannot under any circumstances be damaging.
notes
- for the next week: Notational Devices
- What is a score? What purpose does musicnotation serve?Who gets to be a composer?
- how can we encourage semantic listening with our piece?