The Universal Sense
Read The Universal Sense Online
Authors: Seth Horowitz
Contents
Chapter 1 In the Beginning Was the Boom
Chapter 2 Spaces and Places: A Walk in the Park
Chapter 3 Listeners of the Low End: Fish and Frogs
Chapter 4 The High-Frequency Club
Chapter 5 What Lies Below: Time, Attention, and Emotion
Chapter 7 Sticky Ears: Soundtracks, Laugh Tracks, and Jingles All the Way
Chapter 8 Hacking Your Brain Through Your Ears
Chapter 9 Weapons and Weirdness
Chapter 11 You Are What You Hear
Selected Sources and Suggested Readings
For China Blue and Lance,
partners in acoustic crime
and
Arnold Horowitz,
for late-night weird ideas
A first book is a very hard thing to write, especially when it involves something you feel passionate about. It requires bringing together elements scattered over decades of experience and interactions with a huge number of people, places, and things, living and otherwise. Writing about things heard is particularly difficult because so much of the inner life of sound dwells below conscious thought. At first thought, it seems easy—many of the sounds we pay attention to in daily life are words. You can transcribe conversations or lyrics into written form in a straightforward fashion because words are bound by the conventions of language. But go a bit below the basics of the written and spoken word and you find that the rules of written language only give you a piece of the richness found even in plain speech of a nontonal language such as English. If I write “What?” you, as the reader, understand that I asked a question. But imagine hearing me yell it (WHAT!!!!). Suddenly there is an entirely new context based on how I changed the sound—you are interrupting me, I’m angry or impatient, or you just gave me really bad news and I’m questioning the reality of what you just said. Or
if I say it very quietly after a long pause (… what?), have you just given me really bad news? Just by changing the sound of a simple word, you gain insight into the emotional, attentional, and behavioral state of both the speaker and the listener. While you can describe the sound of a contented cat as a purr, how can you explain how it induces a feeling of calm in its owner or frustration in a person who has become the object of said purrbox’s affections despite a massive allergy to felines? Trying to explain these reactions requires forays into amplitude modulation, interspecies communication, and the emotional function of the brain, both human and feline. And what about the squirm-inducing sound of fingernails ratcheting down a blackboard? Why would we have evolved such a visceral response to a very specific behavior that uses a piece of technology that was only invented in 1815?
The way sounds are made and heard (or not), the effects sounds have on your mind, your emotions, your attention, your memories, your moods, are so vast as to be almost beyond description. There are literally hundreds of excellent (and some not so excellent) books covering individual pieces of this vast puzzle. Yet at the heart of all sound, its perception and effects on living things, lies a mathematical heart that ties together the most basic interactions of matter, energy and the mind.
I decided to write this book because for more than thirty years I have been fascinated by all types of sounds. Sound has held my attention and my passion as I have tried to understand it from a variety of different perspectives—from R&B musician to digital sound programmer, dolphin trainer to auditory neuroscientist, music producer to sonic branding designer—and to integrate it into a single theme: how sound and hearing have shaped the evolution, development, and day-to-day function of the mind.
A couple of words about why this book may be different from other books you’ve read on sound. Most recent science-related works about sound and its various children such as speech, music, and noise are based on neural imaging studies. Techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) create beautiful images of what part of the brain is active when listening to, looking at, or thinking about certain things. For the most part these studies focus on the cortex, the huge convoluted volume of brain that is characteristic of humans and other big-brained mammals such as dolphins and chimps, and hence is what’s called “top-down”—you look at the areas that are involved in the final processing steps for the activity you’re interested in. My take on things is based on how things start in the outside world and work their way in, from the first physical sensations in the ear (and occasionally other sensors) through the lowest parts of the brainstem. My perspective is bottom-up, focusing on elements that underlie and drive high-level cortical and cognitive functions. Both perspectives are critical in science, but to me the bottom-up approach gives a more intimate understanding of the
umwelt
, the world built from your senses. To me (and I hope to you after reading this book), this gives one brain a better chance of understanding the deep processes of another brain in the context of the ever-changing world in which we are embedded.
As with all projects that try to take a broad view of large things, many fine features will get lost in the mix. This book will not be a textbook on auditory neuroscience and perception, but I will try to explain my wonder at how cells a few tens of microns long, working on the picovolt scale and opening and closing molecular channels thousands of times per second, underlie your recognition of your mother’s voice. This book will
not give any ultimate answer to the biological basis of appreciation of music, but it will try to explain why science has such a rough time addressing this type of basic human behavior. Likewise, it will not tell you how to become an award-winning sound engineer, but it might explain why you really shouldn’t shell out any money for ringtones that are supposed to make you irresistible to the opposite sex or drive teenagers off your lawn. And while it won’t be able to explain the choices of filmmakers who insist on inserting explosion sounds in outer-space battle scenes, it will take you on an acoustic tour of places beyond Earth in the hopes that some young readers will actually get the chance to hear the winds of Mars for themselves, and perhaps remember that they read it here first.
It has been more than thirty years since I first thought about writing a book about sound, and if I waited another thirty, I still wouldn’t have the whole story—and I would have even more seriously blown my deadline getting this to my very patient editor, Benjamin Adams. But in those thirty years, I have been blessed with a wide cast of teachers, supporters, colleagues, and friends who have shared and shaped my passion for sound and listening. The short list includes the late Gerald Soffen, former NASA director of life sciences, who first sparked my interest in astrobiology (and was the first to ask me what I thought Mars would sound like). Martha Hiatt of the New York Aquarium was the first person to ever successfully teach me patience by holding out the carrot of letting me work with and learn from Lily, Starkey, and Mimi, the dolphins who inspired my love of animal behavior. Peter Moller of Hunter College tricked me into loving psychology research and introduced me to the world of neuroethology, as well as suggesting that I follow it as a career, starting at Brown University. There I met my advisor, Andrea
Megela Simmons, and my postdoctoral advisor, James Simmons, as well as some amazing teachers and students who became colleagues, including Sharon Swartz, Barry Connors, David Berson, Diane Lipscombe, Judith Chapman, Rebecca Brown, Mary Bates, Jeffrey Knowles, and others too numerous for my page limits. Peter Schultz, friend, scientific provocateur, and director of the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant, has encouraged and helped fund some of my strangest projects. The late, great, and much missed Ed Mullen, the engineer extraordinaire who dubbed me “Dr. Evil” for my interest in the “weirdest things ever built in the name of science” (e.g., a bat-mounted laser pack), helped me carry out some of my most fun studies. Rachel Herz, fellow sufferer of nonsense at Brown and author of
The Scent of Desire
, got me into this whole book-writing mess. Layton Tolson, who has provided constant cheerleading and enthusiasm, also helped me in my first forays in clinical studies of sound and sleep. I also am deeply grateful to Brad Lisle of Foxfire Interactive for bringing me into the
Just Listen
project and giving me the opportunity to hear and work with Evelyn Glennie, an amazing percussionist who gave me some wonderful insight into her unique perceptions of music. Mary Roach, one of my favorite science writers, held my hand through a lot of the first-draft temper tantrums. I also gladly thank my agent, Wendy Strothman, and my editor, the aforementioned Benjamin Adams of Bloomsbury USA.
My greatest thanks have to go to four people who are in some ways the most to blame. My mother, Marlè Fishman, insisted that whatever I do, it should take me where I want to go. My father, Arnold Horowitz, who is my intellectual and creative hero, drilled into me from a very early age that if someone says something is impossible, that just means it will take a bit
longer to achieve, and that the only real failure in working with equipment is if it fatally electrocutes you. My friend and partner in sonic crime for almost fifteen years, Lance Massey, the first person to get a degree in electronic music from Oberlin, the creator of the T-Mobile audio logo, and the man with whom I have been trying to create weapons-grade sounds for over a decade, has kept me going through all this by reminding me that no matter how much science I throw at the writing, in the end it’s all just a jingle. And last but not least, my beautiful, brilliant wife, China Blue, sound artist extraordinaire, who has not only put up with me but collaborated with me on projects that anyone else would have had me locked up for, and only argues with me over access to the soldering iron. Thank you all. This is your fault.
In recent years I spent a lot of time in my office in the basement of the Hunter Laboratory of Psychology at Brown University. I was surrounded by the effluvia of ongoing experiments: little backpacks that allow bats to carry lasers, middle-ear bones from a rhesus macaque, photos of my beaming wife curled up in the Vertical Gun chamber at the Ames Research Center, and calibration instruments so numerous even I don’t know what they are all for. Amid all these distractions, I was often glad it was so quiet. Most people yearn for an office with a window, but I rather dreaded that possibility. While I occasionally had to put up with an alarm indicating that the shop had flooded again or a temperature control had died in the frog colony room, or the occasional beep-beep-beep of a psychoacoustic experiment being run in the lab space across the hall, in general I liked the isolation, and the feeling that I had time to think. Time to think is more of a restricted commodity than you might expect in an Ivy League science department—most time seems to end up devoted to writing memos about the fact that the aforementioned temperature control has failed five times in the last two weeks.
Which leads you to wonder: Is it really quiet in these halls? Even without any alarms or graduate students trying to debug experiments, if I actually paid attention, I could hear pretty much constant noise: low-pitched rumbles of the air vents vibrating, traffic driving past, voices in the next corridor over, humming from an elderly fluorescent light fixture over my head, weird gurgles from the old mini-fridge next to my desk. If I pulled out a sound level meter, the room’s noise level would probably be about 45–50 decibels (re: 20 μPa sound pressure level [SPL]—an important part of the definition of loudness but one that is almost always left out). Yes, that’s on the quiet end of our normal experiences, but it is certainly not silent. It’s quieter than a gunshot, certainly, but if I were a bat or a mouse, the hum from the fluorescent bulb would be a screamingly loud 80–90 dB SPL. And if I were a frog, the gentle vibrations of street traffic would feel about as powerful as an earthquake of about 5.0 on the Richter scale.
There is no such thing as silence. We are constantly immersed in and affected by sound and vibration. This is true no matter where you go, from the deepest underwater trenches to the highest, almost airless peaks of the Himalayas. In truly quiet areas you can even hear the sound of air molecules vibrating inside your ear canals or the noise of the fluid in your ears themselves. The world we live in is full of energy acting on matter—it’s as basic as life itself. And the reasons the constant thrumming doesn’t drive us all insane are the same reasons we get distracted by radio jingles and can’t read when the TV is on: we are good at choosing what we hear. But even if we don’t hear a sound, someone else does.