week1 reading about three modes of listening modes

From Sensation to Perception

Our hearing is influenced by psychological principles (Gestalt) and forms of illusion.

The perception of space, time, and tone follows certain rules laid down by our sensory system and processed by our brain, while entrainment is a special case of our body and mind being able to syncronize with an ecternal rhythm that can then induce a specific physical or psychological state.

Listening modes

Listening begins with being silent － Joachim-Ernst Berendt

Hearing is passive and listening is active. While hearing involves receiving auditory information through the ears, listening relies on the capacity to filter, selectively focus, remember, and respond to sound.

binaural effect: stereophonic reception, help us perceive distance, spatial relationships, and our place in the world.

Our ability to listen is multifocused, which means we can glean information through several different psychological and perceptual perceptives.

Michel Chion, the French film theorist, 3 types of listening modes: reduced, casual and semantic. (referential)

Reduced: refers to the real-time awareness of all the sound quality parameters.

It is about the sound itself not the source or its meaning.

Casual: consists of listening to a sound to be able to gather information about it cause.

Eg: We usually treat a sound (other than speech) as casual, like answering the phone when it rings.

Semantic: it pertains to the spoken language and other code systems that symobolize ideas, actions, and things.

Referential: consists of being aware of or affected by the context of the sound, linking not only to the source but principally to the emotional and dramatic meaning.

Less is more

Sometimes we can get the most impact with the least number of elements.

Eg: Ben Burtt, sound designer for Star War, applies a single breathing cycle with varying speed. The sinister simplicity helped generate a cultural icon.

Gestalt principles and illusion

Gestalt psychology: The whole is different from the sum of its parts. It emphasizes the function of the whole and the relationship between the components which produce the perception.

Figure and ground

Your interests and habits may influence what you listen to.

Eg: the only voice in your native language among all foreign-speaking people.

Sound quality influences what might be noticed in a soundscape in the reverse sense of masking. On the other hand, physical dimensions of the sound have much less influence on the figure-ground phenomenon than does the novelty or contrast of elements.

Eg: Walter Murch, Oscar-winning sound designer of The Goldfather.

Completeness, good continuation, and closure

Draw us to a satisfying conclusion.

Good continuation

Relates to the principle that changes in the frequency, intensity, location, or spectrum of a single sound source tend to be smooth and continuous rather than abrupt. If the change is smooth, then this indicates a single source; if abrupt, then a new source has been activated.

The law of closure states that the mind will tend to unite two disconnected lines lying along the same trajectory.

Proximity and similarity

The law of proximity explains how the brain tends to group nearby objects.

When this rule is applied to audio, where proximity means nearness in time, adjacent sound elements tend to be grouped as a single sound object.

Common fate and belongingness

Common fate refers to the phenomenon of two or more components in a complex sound undergoing the same kinds of changes at the same time, which then become grouped and perceived as part of the same source.

Illusion

While understanding how to produce some really fascinating acoustic illusions is essential to mastering from content.