Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual – Beethoven.
For a physical scientist, a sound is at best, a mechanical disturbance from a state of equilibrium that propagates through an elastic medium, produced by longitudinal compression waves: vibrations that manage to reach our ears, through a medium (say, air) at a frequency to which the human hearing is sensitive.
Sound is estimated to travel at a speed of 760 miles per hour (i.e., 340 meters per second) at sea-level and at a temperature of 20 degree centigrade. The direction of sound waves can be tracked.
When the sound waves strike a solid object or the surface of the liquid, a weakened wave travels on through that body. But a weak sound wave will also be sent back from the surface of the object. We call such reflections as echoes. We can find such echoes across a valley, when our voice bounces off a rocky surface, say a kilometre away.
Echoes are traditionally used to measure the depth of water bodies.
In Golconda fort at Hyderabad, the Nawabs had employed this echo effect for communication and signalling from one end of the fortress to another end, in a time when telephony was not in vogue.
In an empty house, before shifting in furniture and carpet, one could perceive the echo effect. Sound can bend around obstacles falling on their way.
The sound technologists have found that the wave trace for a pure musical tone is that of a sine wave and it requires two numbers to specify it. First, frequency (also referred to variously as the number of repetitions or cycles per second or Hertz or Hz) and second amplitude (or size of the sound wave).
The higher the frequency, the higher would be the pitch, the larger the amplitude, the louder the sound.
A cycle refers to one complete wave.
Physicality of Sound
In the universe, sound wave possibilities exist from a fraction of a Hz. to millions of Hz. It is yet another story that the human ears are not equipped to tap all such possibilities. In other words, the sound spectrum around us is so vast and immeasurable that what we are able to listen to is too meagre and too limited!
Not only our ears, but other parts of our body can detect sounds. The whole body resonates to the sound energy around us, about which we are not all the time aware of.
Any school textbook would say that sound waves, when wafted into the human ear, sets up vibrations on a tissue called ‘eardrum’. These vibrations pass along the bones and fluids in the ear, before they finally set up tiny electric currents in nerve cells running between the ear and the brain. Ultimately, it is the brain that analyses and interprets the sound as pleasant or unpleasant.
Sound Patterns and the Brain
Are sound patterns recognized innately, or are they learned? There are scientific reports, which are path breaking. In one of the articles in Psychology Today, (Oct 2000, p.28), it is reported that while music’s complex representation in the brain makes it difficult to study, a fundamental aspect of music perception is recognition of a melody in different keys; each note’s meaning depends heavily on its context. In one study, animals were exposed to 3 simple melodies with the same middle tone. Almost every neuron responded differently to that middle tone in the different contexts. Neurons learn to prioritise some sounds. When a tone becomes important, because it signals food for instance, the cell’s response to that tone increases. This finding revolutionized our understanding about the brain organization. Learning is not a ‘higher’ brain function but one that occurs in the sensory systems themselves.
This scientific work goes to endorse the traditional belief in India that sound vibrations contained in Vedic recitations and mantras could shape our brain.
Acousmatic Experience
‘Acousmatic’ experience is a term coined by Schaeffer (1966) to refer to the character of sound itself when considered in the context of our musical experience. According to Schaeffer, while listening we spontaneously detach the sound from the circumstances and sources of its production. In other words, sound per se provides the complete object for one’s aural attention. It is this `acousmatic’ experience of sound, which is exploited, in both sensory and spiritual music. In the latter chants are recited through intense conjugation of mind with musical tone (nada), which leads from mindfulness to mindlessness, the yogic state of bliss.
Acoustemology
Drawing together acoustics and epistemology, the term `acoustemology’ was coined by Steven Feld recently. The notion of ‘acoustemology’, is to focus our attention on the primacy of sound as a modality of knowing and being in the world and to explore the reflexive and historic relationships between hearing and speaking, listening and sounding. For instance, listening and voicing are in a deep reciprocity, an embodied dialogue of inner and outer sounding and resounding built from the historicization of experience. The ongoing dialogue of self and self, self and other, of their interplay in action and reaction are thus constantly sited at the sense of sound, absorbed and reflected, given and taken in constant exchange.
The soundingness of hearing and voicing constitute an embodied sense of presence and of memory.
Voice then authorizes identities and identities authorize voice. Voice is evidence, embodied as experiential authority, performed to the exterior or interior as a subjectivity made public, mirrored in hearing as public made subjective.
This reciprocity of reflection and absorption is considered to be a creative means of orientation, one that tunes bodies to places and times through their sounding potentials.
Concern with sustaining patterning sounds has offered creative opportunities in acoustics management.
Soundscapes and Acoustic Ecology
The concepts of `soundscape’ and `acoustic ecology’ were developed by R. Murray Schaeffer in his book, The Tuning of the World, 1977. Soundscapes are not just physical exteriors, spatially surrounding or apart from human activity. They are invested with significance by those whose bodies and lives resonate with them in social time and space.
Synchresis
A notion developed recently by M. Chion, whereby a sound and an image that coincide are perceived as belonging together even if actually unrelated. Thus, as a musician sounds a bassoon, a child can feel that the duck is making that noise and not the instrument. When we are deeply involved in music, we overlook and tend to forget the source (i.e., instrument or artist) from which the music emanates!
Audio-visual Relationship in Sound Cinema
In audio-visual combination, hearing and seeing constantly influence one another. Usually, we tend to perceive sound as if emerging from the visual screen, though the source of sound could be elsewhere e.g., on the headphone. Audio-visual dissonance refers to an effect of contradiction between sound and image at a precise moment in a story. It can even lead to audio-visual monstrosity!
Ecophony
A notion, where one sound may stand out momentarily, then fade into the distance, overlapped or echoed by a new or repeated emergence in the auditory mosaic. One can experience the example of experiencing the overlapping beauty of sounds in listening to the fugues in western classical music, particularly the more famous Little Fugue in G Minor of Bach.
This article was published in AYURVEDA AND ALL, SEPTEMBER 2006 – Pages 28 to 30
Edited by Geeta Sheedar, May 13, 2021