As the year continues, many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…
I’ll be honest, I lied to you last week.
…well, sort of. Talking about spectrum and perception was really all a big set up for this week’s thought.
In his book, The Great Animal Orchestra, Bernie Krause discusses the idea of Biophony; that each sound generating organism evolved in such a way that it’s voice fit into it’s surrounding soundscape so as to not compete with other organisms. If a bird doesn’t have to compete with an insect or a deer’s vocalizations, or even wind for that matter, it doesn’t have to struggle to be heard by its peers. As a result of this, natural soundscapes tend to fill the spectrum of sound. They aren’t isolated into bands. As I discussed last week, the wider the spectral content, the fuller and louder a sound seems.
This has made me wonder about how our environment affected us as we evolved within it. Perhaps this activation of more critical bands was a selective element in our evolution. There are cases of animals becoming quiet when predators are present, which would decrease the spectral content of our environment. If a human’s surroundings didn’t sound as “full” as they usually might, wouldn’t that be a clue that something is out of the ordinary? Would that help an early human survive the rigors of life in the wild? Would that also explain why we are so sensitive changes to the spectral content of sound?
Absence of sound definitely makes many people under fifty nervous, which partially explains the ubiquity of loud music in public and retail spaces.
?
Kidding aside, I think we are more sensitive to a sudden change in some part of the spectrum than we are to its absence.
Gordon Hempton discusses similar ideas about bird sounds in “One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet”. We are keyed into the sound of bird calls because where there are birds there is food/fruits/vegetabes. If we as primitive nomads wander to a forest and hear no birds: then that is a dead forest with no food for us!
Somewhat related to Randy’s coment: the feeling of relief to your ears when a loud AC unit turns off (that you had forgotten was on anyway) makes me wonder what other sounds are out there that are constantly and subtly bombarding us that we arent even thinking about.
My crackpot theory about songbird vocalizations, which I’ve posted about before, is that our eons-long association between the presence or absence of songbird vocals and the presence or absence of predators is the reason that a songbird is just about the only “natural” sound which always evokes a positive/optimistic feeling in a film audience. If we hear no songbird vocals in a forest we are on notice that danger may lurk.
Thats it! Maybe I misremembered where I read it ;D
I think that’s one of the reasons why the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark is so effective. We hear birds and other animals but they are unsettling rather than reassuring. When Indy’s scout reveals the Hovido statue a flock of birds streams out of it and their panic tells us that there’s something dangerous here in the jungle and Indy is probably headed in the wrong direction.
We are definitely more sensitive to sudden changes, Randy, and that’s an important distinction to make. It’s a psychoacoustic trait that’s been heavily explored. I’m just wondering if we have an underlying sensitivity to the fullness of the environment’s spectrum that also has a psychoacoustic effect.