The Science as Fuel for the Art: Module 7

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Four tones play together, and you hear a low pitch underneath them. Then a fifth tone is added at exactly that pitch, and for most listeners the pitch doesn't move at all; the sound just gets a little fuller. In the first version, nothing in the air was sounding at that frequency. Your brain supplied it. This is the audio lecture for the seventh module, where the course stops to ask what sound actually is, and what your ears and brain do with it. There is what's in the air, and there is what you hear, and almost everything interesting in sound art lives in the gap between the two. The physics comes first: sound as a push handed through a medium, and why a crowd's roar can arrive low first, as if a filter were opening. Then the ear's ruler, the decibel, with Simon Carlile on a range of hearing that spans about one to a trillion, and Jeffrey Hass on loudness as "the way in which we perceive amplitude," the equal-loudness curves, and why quiet mixes lose their bass. Then masking, the everyday condition of listening, and timbre, the part of sound we can only describe with words borrowed from light, temperature and touch. Then the ear as an instrument in its own right: the faint sounds a healthy ear makes, Maryanne Amacher's "third ear" music, Jacob Kirkegaard's recordings of his own ears, Diana Deutsch's speech-to-song illusion, and the McGurk effect. It closes on what the physics is for, from noise as a question of health and of whose neighborhoods are loud, to Lawrence Abu Hamdan's forensic listening, and on the choices you have already made by ear: every normalize, fade, filter and pan. Required listening and reading: Maryanne Amacher, "Head Rhythm 1" and "Plaything 2," from Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear), through speakers at a comfortable level; Diana Deutsch, Speech-to-Song Illusion demos; Jeffrey Hass, "What is Loudness?"; Simon Carlile, "Psychoacoustics," sections 3.3 and 3.4. Speakers or headphones, at a comfortable level. Pairs with the Module 7 pages. Chapters 00:00 A pitch nothing is playing 02:22 Something has to move 05:15 A ruler for your ears 08:57 Sounds that hide, and the color of a sound 12:55 The ear plays, too 17:06 What the physics is for