In and Of Sound
Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 6:53PM At 6:57 every morning, the timer on my auto-drip coffee maker flicks on, and my most faithful and punctual friend gurgles to life. The first drop falls from the tip of the cone filter, momentarily wobbling itself into a sphere before striking the bottom of the empty, glass pot. At the instant coffee strikes glass, sound occurs: a spherical wave of air pressure shoots out in every single unobstructed direction at 1,235 kilometres per hour. The pressure wave carries on, perpetuating a game of molecular dominoes until it is eventually reflected or absorbed by any surface, be it the ground, a wall or my ear drum. While my brain has been filtering out countless ambient noises throughout the night, the instantaneous recognition of this particular series of vibrations of the air wakes me up, blissfully aware that in the kitchen, a robot is making me coffee.
I wake up drooling.
(see: The Pavlov Effect)
Sound is a strange phenomenon and a generally underestimated force, one that affects living and non-living things alike. It undoubtedly shapes us from the moment of birth, and probably beforehand as well. After all, hearing and touch are the first senses we experience in the womb, and there’s probably a lot more for a fetus to hear than to touch while waiting for their 0th birthday. What’s an unborn child to do in there, but wait, and listen?
Imagine: nine months of darkness and warmth, punctuated only by the muffled sounds of one person’s voice, unintelligible children’s stories and—heaven forbid—the crappy new age music that your mother has decided to play to you while in utero with her Bellybuds™ so that you’ll be born with a “balanced chi”—wouldn’t you be kicking, too?
Could prenatal sound influence our development? It's quite likely, as sound has been demonstrated to shape that of other species. For example, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have recently discovered that paper wasps drum specific rhythms against their nest chambers with their antennae in order to mould their larvae into either workers or gynes (potential queens), depending on which beat their “percussionists” produce.
The paper wasp is not alone in this regard; even species that have not evolved to use sound as a formative tool are susceptible to its vibrations. The same researchers also demonstrated that young mice that had been regularly exposed to low-frequency sounds grew to have lower body-fat ratios and higher levels of bone density than their unexposed counterparts. Could human development be impervious to sound? It seems unlikely.
Regardless, we embrace sound from the moment of birth, as we’re all immediately drawn to the tone of our mothers’ voice. From there, we begin our subjective categorization of “good sound” (see: that of the drool-inducing coffee drip) and “bad noise” (see: new age albums)—a process most evident in our love and hate of different forms of organized noise: music.
But I’ll save that for later.
Reader Comments (2)
I really enjoyed this article. Dronologue music, or found music (even the sound of your coffe-maker), not only adds a whole new dimension to music creation, but it can be used for music accentuation as well.
I often wondered why there is not yet an official study of rhythm. Like you said, sound influences us from our birth, and there is no place in the vast scheme of science where rhythm of some kind has no part to play. Ezra Pound, no doubt, would probably agree.
I look forward to reading more of these blogs.
Thanks! Yeah, one of the ways in which I appreciate technology's encroachment into music recording is the proliferation of sampling, which makes the incorporation of "found sound" into compositions both easy and practical. I try to use a lot of ambient (and not-so-ambient) noises into my own stuff (see: "Calicodema" in my links for some shameless self-promotion).
A future blog of mine is going to describe the prospects for the "sonification" of data - a lossless audio representation of data which allows for interesting ways to represent information (similar to how fractals are visual representations of mathematical equations). I find this new technique exciting because by using samples from "sonified" data, one can literally and directly incorporate scientific information into music.
The Large Hadron Collider will even make a cameo.