Auditory Pleasure Model

Like love at first sight, the slightest touch between two charged cumulonimbus clouds releases an enormous amount of energy. In a split second, a bright branch of light that is hotter than the surface of the sun rips through the atmosphere. Some of that energy heats the air along the clouds to create an explosive shockwave that can be heard from miles away. The fear of thunder is programmed deep into the mammalian brain. Since forever, humans are fascinated by thunderstorms. They personify the awesome power of lightning as a monster, a demon or a god. Whatever it is, the description of the personified entity has anger management issues. Where does that association comes from? Anger and thunder? The sound of thunder is the source of anger. It reminds them of the uncontrolled shout that humans make with its crashing loudness and destructiveness. It is a warning of death that is threatening to destroy everything in the world. This is why children hold each other to seek comfort from the thunder. Dogs are especially vulnerable to astraphobia. Thunderstorms are processed in the mammalian amygdala because no animal could ever hope to conquer the most powerful phenomenon on Earth. Ancient humans try to control the fear in their minds by creating an avatar to represent the thunder as if it has feelings just like they are. And so Zeus is born from their imagination.

Since I was 5 years old, I was fascinated by thunderclouds. At the time, I lived on the only high rise building in the neighbourhood so I had the privilege of unobstructed view of the sky. During a lightning storm I could see the full splendour of its terrific power. By observing them, I learned quickly that the flashes of the lightning were faster than its roar. There were a few moments of delay before the sound reaches my ears. That delay amused me. I was hypnotized. Many years later, I was surprised to discover from neuroscience that the perception of hearing was actually faster than vision. The discrepancy between the speed of arrival to the sensory channels was compensated by the brain to create a synchronized experience. It was syncing vision with hearing so we perceived them at the same time even though light and sound arrived at different times. This was why lip syncing in movies worked. Hold on! It was a contradiction from my lightning storm observations. Compared to the speed of light, the travelling speed of sound in the air was like a snail. It was indisputable that I saw the lightning flash first before I heard the sound because the delay was noticeable at huge distances. Perhaps the synchronization in the brain failed if the delay was too long. What if the light and the sound arrived at my senses at a closer distance? I had to observe at something smaller than a lightning storm.

First of all, what is a sound? Sound is a perceptive experience generated by the brain from the vibration data of the ear canals. Our ears are sophisticated mechanisms that can detect a wide range of frequencies. The cochlear hair cells can detect the vibration at a molecular level. No other auditory device we have designed can match the sensitivity of these ingenious machines from millions of years of evolution. The pattern of vibration is translated into an electrical signal by the nerves which is then interpreted by the auditory cortex in addition to the motor cortex. Sense of hearing is similar to the sense of touch in that they both discern mechanical movements of molecules to create sensations in the brain. The ears may be a part of the bigger touch sensory system. In other words, the perception of sound only exists in our heads. On the outside world, the vibration of molecules is happening all the time. As long as the temperature is not absolute 0* Kelvin, the atoms and the particles are always moving around. Even if in a solid state, the particles are vibrating with its own frequency. Perhaps you would remember from middle school science class that energy is never destroyed, only changes in form. The law of thermodynamics states that any useful release of energy in the real world can never be 100% efficient. Most of the energy will be turned into heat while some of them will be transformed into sound energy. The energy dissipates into the surrounding medium. Therefore, everything you see in the world is producing sound. The air, the water and the ground are all shaking in excitement this very moment. Since you can’t hear it, that just means you don’t have the necessary attention nor the mechanism to detect it. Different forms of life can detect different levels of sound frequencies based on the niche they are evolved to exploit. Bats can sense and produce ultrasound to navigate their environments. Elephants can hear a storm coming from hundreds of kilometers away due to their infrasound sense. If we encounter alien life that thrives on a planet with an atmosphere like earth, one thing we can be sure of is that it must have evolved the ability to detect pressure waves caused by the vibration of the molecules. The sense of hearing is a universal ability of life to detect small changes in energy between the particles of a medium.

Now I will return to my previous point about the speed of hearing. My favourite genre of gaming is action hack and slash games like Devil May Cry, Dark Souls, God of War etc. They test the speed of my reaction in addition to my combo skills. In Dark Souls 3 for example, the enemy attacks are usually telegraphed. Meaning, they announce their actions before they perform them. These telegraph animations are communicated by visual and sound cues. Interestingly, I have noticed that when I mute the game, my prediction speed is slower. Since I can’t hear the sound cues of an enemy attack, I get hit more often. Visual cues alone aren’t enough. By the time I see it, it’s already too late. When I play with the sound on, I can predict the dodge more successfully. On the scale of a TV (unlike the scale of thunderstorms), the perception between hearing and vision feels instantaneous. The brain has its own ways of perceiving things that is in accordance with the species evolution. The speed of hearing sense is prioritised for two reasons: safety and spatial awareness.

This is my video of the final boss fight in Dark Souls 3. Notice how he produces the sound cues before attacking.

Hearing has a superior range to other senses. Theoretically the eyes can perceive photons at infinite distance which is why we can see stars. But it is not clear. We can barely see with high definition more than 500 meters away. We can hear sounds with high definition from much further away. Not only that, we retain emotional resonance. Far away visual objects are more abstract and blend together into the background because we don’t connect with it on an emotional level. The liveliness of closeup action cannot be discerned from afar. Far away sounds still retain emotional force with a sense of urgency attached to it. This is the prime reason why hearing is always active. Unlike bats which can change the shape of the ear to close up in order to avoid damage from its own loud ultrasonic calls, our outer ears are rudimentary in comparison. We have no flaps to close our ears because doing so would lower the chances of survival. You never know when the next snake or tiger will jump on you. Hearing is connected with the flinch response in the primate evolution. Unexpected loud noises activate the defensive stance of the body to avoid any incoming damage from a fatal attack. Knowing this fact, Ellen DeGeneres loves to scare her celebrity guests with a sudden loud noise. Hearing is important for self-defense reasons. It is perceived quickly; the range is huge and the primal emotions always respond with immediate action. It is the best alarm system we have. Fire alarms and school alarms are based on sound for a reason.

The second reason is spatial awareness. You may not be aware of it consciously but your brain is constantly updating the spatial profile of your surroundings by calculating how the echoes bounce around the room and around the face. Claustrophobia is connected to this ability. This is most apparent when exploring the dark caves. Without vision as a guide, hearing becomes the primary means of navigating the dimly lit surrounding. We do it when we are walking outside as well. We can guess the volume of a given space along with our body position in that space. This is because sounds enter the ears from different positions. Different echoes from the left and the right are recruited to create a mental image of the space. The surround sound systems exploit this phenomenon. Virtual reality games that have a robust echo sound design allow players to explore the virtual environment without having to look at the screen. Even blind people can enjoy playing video games as a result.

Before I move on, I would like to explore the emotional resonance of hearing a little more. How can we imagine this sensation? Think of a giant rubber balloon filled with water. Then you are submerged in the middle of it. The boundary of the balloon represents the range of hearing. The water is the emotional representation of sounds. You are literally submerged in emotion. This is what it feels like to possess the sense of hearing. This emotional universe is reactive with the things and people around you. Every object of sound in the world is tagged with emotion. We cannot hear something without also feeling a reaction towards it. We feel connected to our fellow humans because of the collective sounds we produce. Of course, this connection is not always positive. Some people have an annoying voice or accent that makes me want to puke for example. Now you might be asking yourself. What about people who are born deaf? Are they not ‘submerged’ in emotion like us? Thanks to the wonders of brain plasticity, their emotional areas are more connected to other sensory channels. The younger the person is when the hearing loss happens, the easier it is to rewire the brain. For adults who lose their hearing later in life due to head injuries or ear diseases, the sudden loss of an emotional background is devastating. Sounds they once find pleasurable can no longer be heard. The whispering voice of a lover no longer produces goosebumps. There is a feeling of being abandoned. We can see this more acutely in patients when the hearing loss is more gradual. It is easy to track the progressive worsening of mental health. These people slowly lose touch with their family members and friends. They feel lonelier every day. When everyone around them is animated with passionate conversations, they feel left out. The world is receding away while they remain stationary in the dark. Depression is not uncommon in these circumstances. This is why social integration with the deaf community is a crucial step for emotional balance. It is important to maintain the social connectedness even after the world of sound has abandoned them.

Now that we understand the importance of hearing, let’s talk about how we get pleasure from it. Apart from music, every individual has a certain set of sounds they find pleasurable. This is dependent on the culture and geographical location of the upbringing. A child that grows up on a mountainous terrain will have a different taste to sound pleasure than a child that grows up in a busy city. The mountain child will appreciate the sound of a cold breeze or the sound of water eroding the rocks. He will be more aware of the local animal sounds for reference. The city child on the other hand is more tolerant of traffic noise or the crowd noise. She is excited by human activity and all the sounds associated with it. People talking, shouting, whistling, playing music etc. Both of these children would benefit tremendously if they travel and learn each other’s sound environments. The more soundscapes you are exposed to, the bigger library of sounds in the brain. With a bigger library, there are more opportunities for pleasurable sounds to stick in the mind. Memories also play a role in shaping the pleasure of specific sounds. The brain learns them on a case by case basis. What I mean is that if you have happened to attach a positive memory to a specific sound in childhood, you will find it pleasurable throughout life due to nostalgia. This may not be the case for other people because the same sound might activate a different memory. It will be a monumental task to list every single sound and its memory interaction with every person in the world. The experience of living is far too complicated to come up with a list for everyone. A supercomputer would take thousands to years to process this information. That said, you can make a personal list for yourself of the type of sounds you have learned to find pleasurable. Then you can seek out these nostalgic sounds.

Active Noise vs Ambient Noise

By far the most important element of the pleasure of hearing is deliberate intent. Deliberate intent is when you consciously choose to do something regardless of the choice being an illusion. There is the passive ambient noise in which you are forced to listen everything around you which is the point of having ears. And then there is the active noise in which you have chosen to listen such as music or having a conversation with a person you like. The active noise feels qualitatively different because deliberate intent focuses the attention on the sound signal. This results in pleasurable sensations due to a sense of ownership and predictability. The brain also deregulates the pain sensitivity and annoyance sensitivity. So, louder levels of sound bother you less when you choose to listen to it like going to a concert. The moment you have decided to pursue a certain sound, the brain has already created an expectation of what it will be like to hear it. It is recalling a perceptive map of the sound. This is what I call sound imagery. When the actual sound reaches the ears that matches your expectation, pleasure is released into the body as if relieving a knotted tension. This interplay between tension and release is the true source of pleasure for the active noise.

The ambient noise is different. As I mentioned earlier, the sense of hearing is evolved as an alarm mechanism which requires the animal to be aware of the sonic world at all times. Passive ambient noise is processed from a different pathway in the brain compared to active noise. Firstly, you have no control over where a particular sound will come from. Secondly, you cannot control how loud or intense that sound is going to be. Thirdly, you cannot unhear a sound once you hear it. These elements force the sense of hearing to be vigilant at all times. Unlike focused attention of the active noise, the attention of passive noise is diffuse. Even when you are occupied with something important, some parts of the brain are always active to keep track of the danger level of the surrounding environment. You are never 100% focused. If something is amiss, you will feel an instinct telling you to look up and around. This instinct is created from the sense of hearing. Subconsciously you will hear whatever is bothering you first before being fully aware of the gravity of the danger.

This is why silence is crucial when engaging in a cognitive heavy task like writing, reading, programming, editing photos, and even making music. When the immediate environment is familiar and silent, the vigilant parts of the brain can relax which allows the artist to focus more on the task. The inhibition of these areas diverts the energy to the brain areas you need for creative work. If you are interrupted when someone calls you, the vigilant parts of the brain become active again. The quality of the work will suffer when there is constant interruption. It is your responsibility to control the sound levels of your environment. Anyway, passive noise is not always a bad thing. You can get pleasure from it too when you explore natural habitats.

Geophony and Biophony

The earth is a dynamic world. The tectonic plates are moving and shaping the crust of the planet, raising mountains while eating up continents. The light from the sun bless the earth with refreshing warmth and yet this same energy powers the storms that can topple a city. The amount of energy being released and circulated on the planet every minute can power our global civilization for hundreds of years. I am not joking. The numbers are huge. Of course, this means that it is also a noisy planet. The circulation of energy around the globe carry the sounds with them. These are called geophony sounds. Because we live on a dynamic planet, we can never escape the soundscape that it naturally produces. In fact, we must embrace it. Every region on earth whether it is a desert, a tundra, a mountain, an island or an ocean produces a unique concoction of sounds that results from the interplay of the elements. Listening to the sound and mastering it allow us to understand how best to survive on that particular region. Before sound recording technology was invented in the 19th century, these sounds could only exist in the collective memory of a tribe who have decided to settle in a particular habitat. The sound information is transmitted to successive generations through the stories of heroes, monsters and gods. For example, a story of a fire giant sleeping in an active volcano one day will wake up if the people are behaving badly. It will announce the rise with an enormous roar that can be heard from miles away. A hero must rise up to rescue the people and defeat the fire monster once and for all. In this archetypal story, the danger of a volcano along with its sonic contents is embedded into a drama that unfolds with moral meaning. The sounds of the earth have shaped the evolution of human cultures since we have left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. The sounds of the land connect us emotionally and spiritually. For example, on Chinese New Years Day, it is customary to produce loud noises from explosions like firecrackers or fireworks. The locals used to believe that these loud noises scare the monsters away from human settlements. The ancient logic of the tradition is that humans are scared of loud noises from nature which is governed by demons and monsters. So, we too should release a similar level of loudness to carve a safe human space. Fireworks are a symbol of human separation from the monsters of the land.

It is not just the earth that produces residual sounds. Living things do as well. Because of its energetic state, every complex living being vibrates according to its nature. The world is full of these living sounds spilling out. The sounds of wings flapping, the sounds of tails smacking, the sounds of hearts beating, the sounds of blood flowing, the sounds of stomach rumbling. Not only that, animals actively vocalise using a special organ that can produce air vibrations with muscle power. The purpose of vocalisation varies from species to species. Some use it to call for a mate, to warn their buddies of an incoming predator or to challenge their rivals for a fight. In the case of humans, we use our voice to sing, speak and socialise. All of these are called Biophony. The difference between Geophony and Biophony is only an academic curiosity. In the world, all the sounds mix and match to create a unique soundscape for each environment. The longer one lives in a place, the more one can discern the sonic signature. By listening to living things, one increases the wisdom of the world. Life has so much to teach us by the sounds they make. They are proof that we are forever connected to the living network of the planet. Unfortunately, these sounds are dying due to deforestation and human infestation. We are chasing away the living sounds that we have grown up with for thousands of years. No wonder why a modern lifestyle is full of anxiety and isolation. The voices of nature could not reach their lonely hearts to tell them that they are never alone. They are a part of something greater that has been alive for three billion years. Our songs have been separated from the narrative of the world.

Music

When I sit down in a park and contemplate about it, the pleasure of music is peculiar. People from every culture across the world come up with their own instruments and a system of sounds in which they become familiar with. It is an emergent behaviour. In other words, the sounds they recognize as music is arbitrary. Someone will come up with a random instrument with the materials they happen to find around them. In subsequent generations, this instrument transforms into a complex system of musical sounds. We call it a musical tradition. The pleasure of music is a pattern recognition activity that activates almost every part of the brain: hearing, emotion, memory, narrative, motor coordination etc. The music of an unfamiliar culture is treated as noise, or sometimes worse than noise. An alien musical piece is disorienting and annoying. Theoretically speaking, any bandwidth of noise can develop into music given the right historical circumstances. The instinct of music is universal but the kinds of sounds that will be developed into music depends on the culture. Nowadays, the pleasure of music is obvious due to ubiquitous availability of smartphones and streaming music services. Of course, everyone enjoys listening to music they like except for those who are unfortunate to be born tone deaf or who lost the capacity to enjoy music due to brain diseases. There have been thousands of articles and hundreds of books written about how basic elements of music like pitch, timbre, rhythm, melody engage the ears. I will not discuss them here because it is easy to google about them. Once, a friend of mine surprised me with his astonishing knowledge of musical history. He knew every song from every famous musician in every musical era going all the way back to the Victorian times. Although I found it interesting, I also will not write about musical history since it is not my forte.

That said I would like to touch on alternative points about music that exposes our human nature. Music making, music listening and dancing to music are universal human activities. There are no exceptions. We are apes of music before we upgrade into apes of language. Using music to tell stories predates the written word. Perhaps it predates language itself. Now that I think about it, language and grammar are derivatives of music making that are evolved to enhance the storytelling capacities. Over time, this derivative activity becomes useful outside of music when we need to communicate mundane spatial information quickly while music is preserved for important rituals. Even today in isolated hunter gatherer cultures, there are no linguistic distinctions between language, music and dance. They have the mentality of: if you can talk, you can sing; if you can sing, you can dance. Music and dance are group activities that last for many hours. Western culture has divided them into specialised areas due to historical reasons. This is in no way a universal phenomenon.

If an oppressive government prohibits all forms of music making, it explodes in the underground scene. Enforcing against a universal instinct is bound to fail. Moreover, it transforms into a forbidden pleasure that manifests in weird ways. Extreme scarcity increases the value of music even more. If you want to control the populace, you should be more subtle than banning all music. You have to nudge the production of music that will support your ideological position via emotion. Only then music becomes a powerful tool for creating cultural myths that transforms into unquestionable faith. That’s why all the major religions consider music as an important pillar of faith. Knowing this fact will not make you immune to its effects. Being moved by music is something humans do.

Most of modern songs contain reproductive messages. By that I mean, they contain messages about attraction, love, marriage, breakup, rejection, jealousy etc. The human mating rituals, you get the gist. What is not obvious is the ideological position embedded within the songs like a trojan horse. What I mean by ideological is nothing to do with big -ism ideas. Although it can be. What I am thinking is something more small scale like ‘how things are supposed to be’. How a person should look like to attract a partner. How a person should behave in a relationship. How a person should navigate the thorny issue of breakup. Either consciously or subconsciously, the artist has weaved her beliefs and emotions into the art she produces. Art is not made by robots who only care about technical perfection. Humans have an expectation of how the world should be while complaining how the world is. They express these desires in art. The difference between music and other kinds of artistic mediums is that there are less obstacles to influence the listener. If a song is pleasurable with a catchy melody, all of its ideas are easily absorbed into the listener. The critical mind is no match against the power of music. As I said earlier, music activates almost every part of the brain. It is like being hypnotised. The influx of feelings can overwhelm the critical analysis which uses only a small part on top of the brain. In fact, the frontal cortex along with the default mode network is often silent when listening to music. This is why music is used for different social purposes. It has been used to create a sociable atmosphere, to reinforce social rituals, to institute patriotism, to communicate abstract information, to work out in a gym, to provide pacing in movies, to celebrate winning a contest, to market a product, to warn about urgent matters, to communicate with God etc. There are as many uses of music as there are subcultures. Music makes everything better.

Finally, the power of music reaches its full potential when it becomes the anchor to create new worlds. Recall earlier of the image of being emotionally submerged in a giant rubber balloon filled with water. This balloon can be transformed into a virtual world that feels emotionally real. The movie industry has been honing the skill of applying music to enhance the immersion effect for decades. The editing team is the most important component in putting a movie together. The actors provide their performance. The directors and screenwriters provide a script and a vision with rough ideas on how the movie will begin and how it will end. But it is the editing team that makes the movie. Most of them are musicians before they become editors. Is that a coincidence? I think not. The flow of the movie is a sense of time generated from hearing. You can imagine the feeling when you are utterly absorbed into a film’s storytelling that you lose track of the clock. All thoughts of self-doubt vanish as you meld your emotions with the characters on the screen. It is hypnotic. Billions of people pay money to have this experience. They enjoy being manipulated by the emotions of the story. Music and the sound effects are causing this flow experience. When you watch a movie silent, you lose track of the implied events in the background that are indicated by the sound effects. Without sound or music, a movie loses its emotional richness. As a musician, editors understand the flow of time that shapes the story of a film. Every musical piece, every sound effect and every line from the actors are carefully put together to tell an engaging story. Each minute of a film takes weeks to edit. In other words, every movie is a musical. In a traditional musical film, the emotional nature of music is exaggerated by letting the characters sing and dance directly. If you look at the nitty gritty of sound editing, a musical is not that different to a non-musical movie. Even a documentary utilizes music to shape the emotional expectation of a scene. A pride of lions chasing a deer has a different emotional resonance when played with a fast-paced rock music vs a slow-paced classical music. All in all, the ultimate end point of a story is in the mind. The sense of hearing is the vehicle that takes the story home to where it belongs.

Video games take a step further into true immersion. Because of its interactive nature, the application of music expands into interesting directions. Decades of editing knowledge from the movie industry can be applied to games as well in the form of cutscenes. Cutscenes are fixed narrative rewards that are given to a player to expand the world building and character development. It usually occurs at the end of a level so there is a purpose behind the actions taken in the game. However, this is not the only way to apply music in video games. Another one is interactive combat. Video games record every action made by the player. Unlike the complexity of real life, game actions are easily quantifiable. The actions can be organised into a hierarchy within a system and then music is utilised to motivate the players to reach the top of the hierarchy. To put it another way, the game is the DJ who is rewarding the player to dance harder with more hardcore music. But the player is in control of shaping which musical event will play. Interactive music is a game within a game. The pleasure induced by interactive music is empowering to the point of wiping out all feelings of anxiety. I feel powerful when I can shape the music because of my skilled gameplay. I am playing the game and the music simultaneously. I lose track of time and end up playing more than I should. It is one of the most pleasurable experiences in life.

Let me give you a concrete example to show you what I mean. The Devil May Cry series is famous for its encouragement of style in the gameplay. The players are expected to kill the demons from the underworld not only efficiently but also with style. Doing the same combat moves over and over like a little child is not stylish. The style system in the game expects the player to chain together a variety of moves and difficult manoeuvres. At its peak, it is an artistic expression of 3D movement in a virtual environment. Every player uses the combos differently. Some are attracted to ground based moves while others stay in the air as long as possible by jump cancelling on an enemy’s face. Some like to finish their combos while others constantly chain them like a mad man without any resolution. Some like to exclusively use firearms while others stick with swords. The best players use both firearms and demonic swords in a beautiful display of self-expression. The player’s personality oozes out from their gameplay. There are 7 ranks in the style system starting with D all the way to SSS. They are: Dismal, Crazy, Badass, Apocalyptic, Savage!, Sick Skills!! and Smoking Sexy Style!!! The style points multiply according to the style rank the player can maintain. The system punishes getting hit, repeating moves or failing to follow up from previous combos.

Notice how the music changes with the style meter.

In Devil May Cry 5 which is the latest addition to the franchise, there is a new twist to the style system. The background music also responds to the style meter. When we are talking about dynamic video game music, we must abandon the notion of a song as one single track with a defined beginning and an ending. In game music, a song is divided into many chunks that play at specific moments of the gameplay. Each chunk has several variations in terms of tone, beats, instrumentations and vocals. The permutation of different combinations can become substantial. Ok, back to DMC 5. While the player is exploring the environment, the music is a slow-paced ambient version of the main song. When they encounter the demons, the intro portion of the main song is played on loop. It transitioned from the ambient track into the intro seamlessly. This is called Horizontal Resequencing. At every transition point which is defined by the composer, the music reacts to the state of the game. As the fighting starts, the two main verse of the song are randomly chosen by the audio remixing program in the game between the D-rank and the B-rank. As the player reaches the A-rank, the drums and the beats become faster which increases the heartbeat of the player. This is the transition point between the lower ranks and the higher S-ranks. When the player achieves the illustrious SSS-rank, the full chorus with the vocals and the instruments are playing at full volume with the fastest beat. This is called Vertical Layering. With every layer of the style rank, the vocals, the lyrics and the instruments add on top of one another. The end psychological effect is incredible. The game is intelligently motivating the player by changing the music according to their style. Maintaining a higher style rank is so engaging that frissons activate throughout the body following waves of pleasure. If the player is careless, the style lowers to B-rank while the music transforms back into the verse. Those who have tasted the divine fruit of SSS musical event will do everything in their power to get back into the prime state all over again. This is immersion at the highest level.

When we read, our brains transform the shapes of letters and characters on a page into the sounds of spoken language. But how does the brain do this? That's what cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene is trying to find out.

Language

Here is a controversial claim that you may not agree with. Reading and writing are not language. They are a parasitic dialect of language that we are forced to learn. Speaking and listening are true language. Think of reading and writing as antiparticles of listening and speaking. Please let me explain. Babies learn to speak without any formal instruction. If you let them be around other people, they naturally listen and learn to speak. Learning grammar of the mother language is also a natural task. They learn from the bottom up, through imitation and trial and error. Sometimes the adults give them instant feedback if they speak in the wrong grammar for instance which accelerates the learning process. Writing however requires linking between the visual sense and the hearing sense. It is too abstract for children to learn writing on their own. The letters have no connection to any object in the real world although they represent specific vowels and consonants. Writing rules are arbitrary and haphazard due to historical reasons. This is counterintuitive for children which is why they need formal instruction. I remember my sister suffered a lot when she learned to write. She was punished for not being able to write the letter ‘K’. The angle of the letter was too much for her four-year-old brain to handle. The shape of ‘K’ did not exist in the real world. It was something we invented. Eventually she got the hang of it. Her brain recycled the facial recognition areas of the visual sense to recognise the letters as units of sounds.

Literacy was a recent phenomenon in the evolution of human beings. If anything, it was an accidental invention. The original purpose of writing was to record food stocks and resources for the elite. In other words, it was a new system of accounting that was more reliable than counting in the head. It was difficult to keep track how many grains of rice there were in storage so writing was developed to externalise that knowledge. Hunter-gatherer societies had no need of writing because they didn’t need to keep track of massive amounts of resources. If they wanted anything, they just went out and collected from the natural reservoirs. Humans had been living in this state of balance with nature for a very long time. Speaking a language and playing music were as old as humanity itself while writing appeared as a by-product of an agricultural society. Slowly, writing entered other realms of human activity such as law making, literature, poetry and art. Before the invasion of this parasite, cultural knowledge was transferred orally. This was a serious business. Some idiots liked to reference the Chinese whisper game to point out that oral transmission of knowledge was unreliable. Chinese whisper was not a good way to transfer knowledge. Nobody was serious about accurately transferring the message. In fact, a rebel in the group would purposely change the message midway to make sure that the game ended with a funny phrase. Our ancestors however took the oral tradition seriously. If the information memorised was not accurate, the student would be beaten with a stick. Every word, every story, every retelling must be remembered to the word. A mistake was not tolerated. Even after hundreds of years, stories were preserved with remarkable accuracy. The storytellers felt a sense of pride in carrying the collective knowledge of the tribe. This was how most religious scriptures were preserved before being written down. The stories only changed because there was an outside disruption to the culture like an invasion or a natural disaster. In such an event, it was natural for oral traditions to disappear. A knowledge that existed only in the brain did not survive more than one generation in the case of a disaster. This was why writing was adopted over the last five thousand years to circumvent that limitation.

Regardless of what I have been taught in language classes, I believe that the best form of writing is synonymous to speaking. I have always wondered why some books are absorbed easily into my mind while others feel unnatural. Then I realise that the best non-fiction authors talk to the reader through the medium of words. They are not writing a report. They are conversing with the mind of the reader. Books become alive when being interacted with an active mind. This means that I can learn from the masters of past and present. Time is of no consequence. A great book engages the reader regardless of the cultural era because it connects with the human heart via the sense of hearing. Formal writing on the other hand is a tool of bureaucratic process, a mockery of what writing should be. Nobody speaks like formal writing. It sounds absurd. So why do we have them? Formal writing aims for precision rather than accuracy. It is used in systems that does not desire any ambiguity. But this is not how real-life works. Ambiguity exists in human experience. Language can never capture the complexity of reality. That’s the beauty of it. It is the imperfection of language that allows artists to play around with the sounds in literature. The genius of writing becomes alive when it embraces ambiguity with the emphasis on how sounds from the words flow into one another. Reading and writing are an exercise of the sense of hearing, not vision.

Human Voice

One of the most delightful sources of pleasure in everyday life is the human voice. Somehow our brains are tuned to this sound more than any other sounds I have mentioned previously. The human voice is a fantastic example of the blend between nature and nurture. The voice box in our throat is not only shaped by the genetic recipe that instructs how to build the muscle structures but also by environmental influences. When reaching puberty, the high-pitched voice of a child is changed by the hormones to either become deeper for a man or remain as high for a woman. No one has the exact same voice. That doesn’t mean it remains static. A person’s voice changes multiple times over a lifetime. Professional singers have learned the hard way that even diet and air pollution could affect the quality of the voice. Regular exercise of the voice muscles is crucial to maintain a valuable tool of entertainment. That is not all. How you use the voice also changes your relationship with it. The voice is a powerful weapon to influence other human beings on an emotional level. It has a certain seductive characteristic. What I mean by seduction is the special element of the voice that has the power to attract the ears of the target audience. It makes them want to listen. The most famous leaders and dictators in history have deployed various public speaking techniques to preach their views. Their voice activates waves of emotion through the crowd like the Mexican wave in a sports stadium. The most important element is the richness of voice. Every change in thought is accompanied by a change in the characteristic of the voice whether it is the inflection, emphasis, loudness or pitch. A diverse portfolio of voice skills is essential to create the voice of authority. You can feel that the sound coming from that special voice is flowing like a river that has the power to cut through mountains. Every speech is born again in the context of the crowd.

In a one to one conversation, a confident gentle voice that is devoid of hesitation is the most attractive. No one likes a loudmouth or a flat introverted voice. The pleasure of hearing forces the mind to pay respect to the words. In the case of flirting, a woman naturally raises her pitch while a man deepens his pitch. This is a subconscious natural instinct of the human voice because doing so increases the attractiveness value. If you want to win the heart of someone, not only should you speak in their mother tongue, you should also speak in the accent that they grow up with. This double whammy convinces the other person to recognise you as part of the group. You are safe to trust. With the foundation of trust, love and respect are not far away. How you produce the pronunciation is critical in winning their hearts.

Why accent in particular? Every accent has a rich history not only among the speakers but also to those who hear it. Stereotypes are often formed around the accent that create unpredictable effects. For example, Americans find the BBC British accent sexy because of a common trope in Hollywood cinema. Even if you are not British, speaking this accent to someone who values it could bring life changing advantages. If you speak like someone from a ghetto, your words will be devalued even if you are speaking the truth. The brain finds it difficult to divorce the voice of the speaker from the content of the conversation. Do not ever speak in an atrocious broken accent that is an affront to the native ear. What I am trying to point out is that your voice is more malleable than you believe. You should always aim at giving the hearing pleasure to people by adapting your voice according to their tastes. They will appreciate the gesture more than you can imagine and reward you handsomely.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize the points I have made so far about the hearing pleasure by contrasting with a specific set of sounds that everyone hates. These are the sounds from the tools and technology we have invented. The artificial machines produce unwanted vibrations that annoy the bystanders. Unlike geophony or biophony, we have not evolved to find pleasure in the artificial sounds. The vibrations are unlike anything we find in nature. Millions of years of primate evolution did not account for recent developments of human engineering. Unlike music or language, the sounds are not ordered with human intention. There is no meaning behind them. It’s just ceaseless uncaring annoying background noise we must learn to tolerate. Philosophers, writers and deep thinkers from every age have complained about this type of noise. Silence is essential when trying to think about complicated topics. By silence I mean, silence from artificial noise. Absolute silence will mess with the brain and it will start to hallucinate. The natural noise is not a problem for the mind although it depends on the personality of the thinker. Now the dominant noise plaguing the modern soundscape is car traffic. The incessant noise of traffic makes my blood boil. It is one of the reasons why I have decided not to learn to drive. Cities that have banned cars around the central areas are decorated with natural sounds of livelihood. A walkable city is more fun to live in. Luckily, I am living in London which invests in human friendly (as opposed to car friendly) urban designs. Although, there is another kind of noise I have to deal with when travelling on the underground trains. The Jubilee and Central lines in the eastbound trains have high noise levels that make thinking itself difficult. Even listening to music on earphones cannot compete with the noise. Although, the underground noise doesn’t happen often which makes it more tolerable to the noise of traffic. The most important innovative front of hearing pleasure is to lessen the noise of modern machines that infect the soundscape. Smartphones and tablets are remarkably silent compared to its predecessors. Electric cars and electrification of public transport are becoming the norm. Sound insulation in a home is an essential need to separate the noise of a busy city from a peaceful physical space. Artificial noise from machines, tools and devices increases the stress levels that are slowly killing the populace. We have to remove it by reinstalling the natural sounds that human beings have evolved to find pleasure in.

Auditory Pleasure Model

Active Noise vs Ambient Noise

Geophony and Biophony

Music

Language

Human Voice

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