Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise
Michel Chion is a composer, filmmaker, teacher, researcher, and the author of several books, including Film, A Sound Art; The Voice in Cinema; and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen.
James A. Steintrager is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine; he is the author, most recently, of The Autonomy of Pleasure: Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution.
This chapter gives overviews of two scientifically objective approaches to sounds: acoustics and the physiology of audition. It provides encapsulations of key notions such as the propagation, refraction, and reverberation of sound waves, frequency and pressure amplitude, the structure of the human ear, and the neural and electrochemical bases of hearing. It then examines how these objective sciences of hearing cannot remove significant subjective components from listening and, in fact, point us in the direction of a constructivist understanding of sonic experience. For example, it considers how we construct perception of fundamental frequencies that do not exist physically out of...
Advertisement
