ProSoundWeb: Part two (here) of this four-part series looked at the issue of consistency in describing and conceptualizing sounds as live sound engineers. If we happen to believe that sounds are located at the sounding source and arise in connection to sound waves in a medium, we will have some philosophical work to do to defend the claim that an imagined sound counts in the same way.
2 comments:
I thought I knew what my answer would be but then I read “Was the thing I heard just now one of the “echoes” or was it the primary sound?” and I started second guessing myself. In the case of a person talking, I think that anything coming straight from them is the primary sound. Anything that bounces off any type of surface is an echo. I know that a good part of what we hear when we have conversations are “echos” then, but I think that isn't a huge stretch and that those reverberations should count as echos. In terms of figure 2, I think no, the echo C is not the same as the primary sound. After it’s hit the brick wall, it's no longer coming from the direct source. It will be different because not all of the sound from the source has come back to Bryce. Some of it has scattered, and the sound that comes back to Bryce could sound different because of the material of the wall. In the same way that echoes sound different depending on the size of the room, the carpeting, what’s on the walls, etc. Whether it would be a new sound or just a modified version of the original starts to become a completely different philosophical discussion, like the Ship of Theseus. At what point does it become its own thing?
I hadn't thought to think about how sound is classified and the underlying philosophy behind the words and terminology used to describe sound and the effects that has on understanding and general communication. Differences in definition have been a leading cause of misunderstanding and also of what I call violently agreeing, where two people use different terms that mean different things to each individual, but within each of their minds they are agreeing together on the overall point, but it looks like an argument. To get back to the article, I had no idea that echos would be a point of contest for a terminology debate. I had thought that echos were one thing and that they are the air waves bouncing of another surface and being slightly changed in that process and that was why echos sounded faint and different. Now after reading the article I have to think a lot more on what an echo is and the nature of sound and words in general.
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