Sound in our (digital) life

Unless your deaf, sounds make up a great part of your perceivance in life. How familiar words may sound, in the end it is sound linked to a signification and understood by the repetitive hearing of the same or similar sound. Sounds a little bit complicated? No it isn’t. Imagine you listening to Chinese, and a Chinese person listing to English. They both perceive the same thing in the beginning> Sounds. While learning a lenguage you are going to link a signification to this sound (by experience) and you are able to communicate. That is how you learn every lenguage, verbally and spoken.

That we switch to music. How is music making part of our lifes? Music can influence or mood. If it are noises rapidly followed by eachother (e.g. Techno, House, Heavy-Metal) it can make us feel very uneasy and ready to dance, or throw out all our cropped up energy. On the other hand slow music (e.g. Regea, Easy-listening, Singer-Songwriter, Pop, Classical music) can make us feel very relaxed and willing to recharge our energy by doing nothing.

Than only rests to talk a little bit about sounds and ambient sounds. They are a crucial aspect in films to create confidence and a natural feeling to the film. Alfred Hitchcock used it a lot to create tension in his movies (telephone rining, birdsounds in a bad context). And we can’t sleep at night from a dropping crane, the wooshing wind or the always anoying ticking clock.

No wonder that we intergrated sound in our digital systems and it is used in the digital contemporary art to use it in a new context. For example artists that make music with things we use everyday and artists that use Sergi´s invention the Reactable (see the lifeclip on Youtube of Bjorks declare independence). Understanding sound, and ones reactions on sound, is one of the crucial aspects of understanding the human being and AI.

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