This book is about the tiny sounds of the world, and listening to them, the minute signals that are clues to who and where we are. A very small sound, given the context of its history, becomes hugely significant, and even an imagined sound in a picture becomes almost a voice. By speaking a name, we give a person back to the world, and a breath, a sigh, a laugh or a cry need no language. A phoneme is the start of all stories, and were we able to tune ourselves to the subtleties of the natural world, we might share the super-sensitivity of members of the bird and animal kingdom to sense the message in the apparent silence. Mind hears sound when it perceives an image; the book will appeal to sonic and radio practitioners, students of sound, those working in the visual arts, and creative writers.

This book contains a complete and accurate mathematical treatment of the sounds of music with an emphasis on musical timbre. The book spans the range from tutorial introduction to advanced research and application to speculative assessment of its various techniques. All the contributors use a generalized additive sine wave model for describing musical timbre which gives a conceptual unity, but is of sufficient utility to be adapted to many different tasks.

The highly accessible Sensation and Perception presents a current and accurate account of modern sensation and perception from both a cognitive and neurocognitive perspective. To show students the relevance of the material to their everyday lives and future careers, authors Bennett L. Schwartz and John H. Krantz connect concepts to real-world applications, such as driving cars, playing sports, and evaluating risk in the military. Interactive Sensation Laboratory Exercises (ISLE) provide simulations of experiments and neurological processes to engage readers with the phenomena covered in the text and give them a deeper understanding of key concepts. The Second Edition includes a revamped version of the In Depth feature from the previous edition in new Exploration sections that invite readers to learn more about exciting developments in the field. Additionally, new Ponder Further sections prompt students to practice their critical thinking skills with chapter topics.

What does a place sound like – and how does the sound of place affect our perceptions, experiences, and memories? The Sound of a Room takes a poetic and philosophical approach to exploring these questions, providing a thoughtful investigation of the sonic aesthetics of our lived environments. Moving through a series of location-based case studies, the author uses his own field recordings as the jumping-off point to consider the underlying questions of how sonic environments interact with our ideas of self, sense of creativity, and memories. Advocating an awareness born of deep listening, this book offers practical and poetic insights for researchers, practitioners, and students of sound.

Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur's point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of great concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists. Research in recent decades has established two distinct types of aural perception: a nonspeech mode, in which the acoustic signals are received in the manner of musical sounds or natural noises; and a speech mode, in which acoustic signals are excluded from awareness and only an abstract phonetic category is perceived. Here, Tsur proposes a third type of speech perception, a poetic mode in which some part of the acoustic signal becomes accessible, however faintly, to consciousness. Using Roman Jakobson's model of childhood acquisition of the phonological system, Tsur shows how the nonreferential babbling sounds made by infants form a basis for aesthetic valuation of language. He tests the intersubjective and intercultural validity of various spatial and tactile metaphors for certain sounds. Illustrating his insights with reference to particular literary texts, Tsur considers the relative merits of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to the emotional symbolism of speech sounds.

In this poetic exploration of the auditory imagination, the third in his series on sonic aesthetics, Seán Street peoples silence with sound, travelling through time and space to the distant past, the infinite future and the shadow lands of the inner psyche. Our mind is a canvas on which the colours of the sound world leave permanent impressions. It is the root of all listening.

This book presents a comprehensive review of how acoustic waves are processed by the auditory system into structured sounds such as musical melodies, speech utterances, or environmental sounds. After an introduction, an overview is given of how the ears distribute acoustic information over a large array of frequency channels that contain the auditory information used by the central nervous system to generate a mental image of what is happening around the listener. This process, called auditory scene analysis, consists of two stages. In the first stage, auditory units are formed such as musical tones and speech syllables. Each auditory unit is perceived at a well-defined moment in time, the beat location of that auditory unit. Moreover, from this process of auditory-unit formation, the auditory attributes of these auditory units emerge, such as their timbre, their pitch, their loudness, and their perceived location. Each of these attributes is discussed in the corresponding chapter. In the second stage of auditory scene analysis, auditory-stream formation, the successive auditory units are integrated into auditory streams, i.e., temporally structured sequences of auditory units that are perceived as emanating from one and the same sound source. Examples of such auditory streams are musical melodies and the utterances of one speaker. The temporal structure of an auditory stream, its rhythm, is determined by the beat locations of its auditory units. The role played by the auditory attributes of the consecutive auditory units is discussed. The melodies of musical streams and the intonation contours of spoken utterances emerge from this process. In music, the beats of parallel streams generally fit into a metric pattern, and, depending on harmony, simultaneous tones can be perceived as consonant or dissonant. Finally, the book contains many sound examples including the MATLAB scripts with which they are generated.