2. When Does Hearing Begin?
• In the womb
• Babies only hours old are able to differentiate
between sounds from their native language
and a foreign language, scientists have
discovered. The study indicates that babies
begin absorbing language while still in the
womb, earlier than previously thought.
• Pacific Lutheran University (2013, January 2).
Language learning begins in utero, study finds
5. How Do We Hear?
Electrophysiological response to
voice
• Left - vocal sound signal
entering the ear (middle)
• Right - brain electrical
activity related to voice (red
curve),
• bird songs (green curve)
and
• environmental sounds (blue
curve).
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/archive/2009/091019pr-brain-responds-to-human-voice-in-fifth-ofsecond.aspx
6. How Sound Enters Your Brain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv_-z4iq4Tc
9. What Voices Tell Us
http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=1865
“we routinely extract from voices
a wealth of socially-relevant information
in what constitutes a more primitive,
and probably more universal,
non-linguistic mode of communication.”
10. Live Sound Tells Us …
http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=1865
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Where positioned
Gender
Nationality
Approximate age
Identity types
Speaker’s mood and affective state
Fairly detailed picture of the type of social
interaction
11. We All Hear Differently
• Like seeing, without glasses
• Like dyslexia
12. Audio Processing Disorder
• Problems carrying out multi-step directions
given orally,
• Language difficulties (e.g., confuse syllable
sequences, etc.)
• problems determining the direction of sounds
13. More Audio Processing Disorder
• difficulty perceiving differences between
speech sounds
• confusing similar sounds such as "hat" with
"bat", "there" with "where", etc.
14. And More
• Background noise, such as the sound of a
radio, television or a noisy bar make it
difficult to understand - problems separating
out “strands” of sounds – groups talking, voice
vs radio, etc
• Using a telephone without visuals - need to lip
read, read body language, and use eye contact
15. Listening - a Collage of Skills
• Predicting
• Guessing - Ever ‘replay’ what someone said in
your head - and then understood?
• Reflection – commenting in your head as you
listen, evaluating, noticing
• Understanding intonation – paralanguage 'paralanguage' is often used to refer to nonverbal elements of speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication
16. More Listening Skills
• Recognizing connectors https://www.dlsweb.rmit.edu.au/lsu/content/
4_writingskills/writing_tuts/linking_LL/senten
ce.html
• Recognizing discourse markers – Once upon a
time … etc.
17. About Recorded Sounds
• Replay possible
• Controlled layering of sound
• aural composition closer to Levi-Strauss’s
“bricolage” or a visual collage than to the
finely detailed edited text
• ephemeral - can’t trap an aural frame of
sound as you can a visual frame of a video
18. Hearing and Listening
• Hearing starts before birth
• We get a great deal of information from
voices
• Audio Processing Disorder information and
audience needs
• Listening skills
• Recorded sounds are experienced differently
from ‘live’ sounds
• Editing audio is different from editing text – a
mix rather than individual bits