Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

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Remarkable Features of Sound

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Because we grow up with our senses mostly intact, we naturally take them for granted. We rarely pause to explore how various receptors make connecting to the world possible.

Details about the sensory equipment we carry are fascinating, none more so than sound and hearing. Their obvious importance rests uncomfortably near their precarious fragility. Exploring this subject in The Sonic Imperative over the last few years was not exactly a vacation, but it was an interesting visit to a different geography that is often overlooked. The journey revealed many surprises, including these three:

  1. The speed of sound is relatively slow. We think of breaking “the sound barrier” as the very definition of “fast.” But in the broader perspective of sound physics, our atmosphere puts a considerable drag on the distances a voice, piano or evening thunder can cover. Sound travels through the air at about 1125 feet a second. That’s about three football fields long, or a little more than the length of the long side of one block in Manhattan. When you watch nearby fireworks, they usually come with a delay between the explosions of color and their sounds; the relative delay is obvious. Lightning gives us an the same sense of the huge gap between the speeds of light and sound. Light travels 186,000 miles in the same second that sound covers a few hundred feet. And here’s the interesting point that is also an advantage to humans and other animals. The relative slowness yields what is sometimes called the “shadow” effect in listening. We have two ears  6 or 7 inches apart. That’s enough to give our binaural hearing a chance to hear the difference in the arrival of sound to one side and then to the other: one reason music in a great hall or on a good system is so pleasing. Even if we can’t see them, we can locate instruments or singers in a dimensional “soundstage.”

2. Another unusual feature of hearing is that sound may be the most persistent of all senses. We never shut our ears as we do with our eyes. And although its unfortunate that adults have usually lost some hearing acuity due to age and abuse of hearing receptors, most of us actually start picking up sounds in the womb at about 30 weeks. We hear our mothers before we are born. Equally unusual, there is some evidence to suggest that hearing and its brain functions survive for a short time even after death is pronounced.

3. Home music listeners have to face hard truths about the limits imposed by a listening room. Most domestic spaces are too small to accurately produce low frequency sound energy: the very source of what gives music so much of its punch and presence. The fact is that low frequency sound “waves” require a lot of energy and are long: often longer than the available space. The sound produced by a nice fat bass note produced on a piano or a bass guitar at 40 Hz unfolds fully only in a space of 28 feet or more. No such problem exists for higher notes in the musical scale, which may have waves which are just a few inches in length.

Why is the lower number a problem? A sound wave that does not have sufficient space for its full cycle will distort, a bit like waves that break against a cliff. We obviously can’t see it, but sound energy that has insufficient space to play out as it should results in what I think of as “wads” of faux bass: a lot of boom but not much musical clarity. Sound engineers often call this undefined low-note energy “one-note base:” an indistinct rumble of low frequency wave energy bouncing off walls or ceilings before it has run its course. To a careful listener the effect is “muddy” or “boomy.” One reason we cherish big old spaces like Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral is that its 400-foot length is a perfect acoustic for its two organs and singers. To be sure, we have grown tin ears that accept dead thuds of low frequency sound as base.

It can be a revelation to accurately hear low notes as they are meant to be heard. This is one reason audio in a good movie theater or concert hall is usually going to sound better than audio of the same program reproduced in a 20 by 12-foot living room.  One cure is to listen to music at at a moderate listening level, which is usually handled better by a room of limited size.

These and other interesting facets of sound are explored more fully in a host of books, including—a pitch is coming: The Sonic Imperative: Sound in the Age of Screens.

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We Easily Miss the Big Stuff

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Popular imagination typically lags way behind innovation, and sometimes unwanted change.

We live our lives as a continuing series of adjustments to what we know or what we believe. There’s sometimes nothing wrong with this. After all, even when the evidence is clear, it takes a lot of cognitive work to abandon long-standing patterns of thinking. Think of us as moving around a lot of heavy mental furniture.  It took a long time to acquire it, and we’ve carefully arranged it in our minds. We want everything in its place so we can move through it with ease. An active imagination is no help: the goal is to not have to trip over unfamiliar facts or attitudes.

Eventually, a degree of hindsight or perhaps events on the ground force us to acknowledge emerging realities that we could have seen coming years earlier.  For example, I can’t remember ever reading much about GPS systems, which moved from military to civilian applications between the mid-1980s and 2000. I probably didn’t look, and didn’t know that I would care. It seemed like, all of a sudden, a lost hiker or motorist could find their exact position on a map of their area, thanks to the precision that is possible with receivers that can triangulate to signals beamed from from satellites. Car navigation systems have become common, with most now counting on this useful advance. This was the case of a rapid and consequential change coming to most of us from our blind side. I, for one, will never be lost again on nearby Whiskey Lane or Stompf Tavern Road, though I suspect some earlier settlers had their own reasons for wandering in circles.

For most Americans, the same pattern of unexpected and rapid adaptation to an innovation was true with the miniaturization made possible by transistors, or the use of multi-track recording on tape in the 1940s, or ATM machines that suddenly appeared on the outsides at banks. Sound on sound was a novelty when Les Paul applied to music, and “banks that would never be closed” was an advance that seemed like an instant and new convenience.

I’m old enough to remember smirks of disbelief  from others if a conversation turned to the prospect of electric toothbrushes, phones that people would actually want to answer, electronic books, cryptocurrencies, or airlines that sold seat space measured in centimeters.

More recently, many of us have been surprised that reliable vaccines for COVID-19 were developed so rapidly. Who knew that the nRNA idea behind some of them has been around for a while and usefully adapted for this supreme test?  It’s a reminder that other medical marvels are just out of view.

All of this makes me wonder how many tech-savvy people at the time knew that Xerox/PARC was designing the way most computer displays would evolve. Reportedly, Apple’s Steve Jobs’ could see the future in Xerox’s true “visual interface,” which he “borrowed” to make his own devices do more than offer a grey screen with green text. And on a less urgent note, probably no one could have imagined that an obscure British composer, Gustav Holst, would anticipate modern film music so completely. His 1916 tone-poem, “The Planets,” is now a kind of template for music used in modern action-adventure films.

My point is that the popular imagination lags way behind innovation or sudden new realities. Sometimes we are just slow to join the party.  At other times the price we pay may be great. We still have Americans who didn’t notice an attempted coup at the nation’s Capitol on January 6. And the rest of us couldn’t have imagined that such a foul political act might be attempted in the United States:  a dramatic case of incrementalist thinking leaving us clueless about what was about to happen.