Acoustic Communication

The most interesting thing I find about this article is the sound symbol and metaphor. Our brain can store the sound combining with the concrete images. But what attracts me is the relationship between these sounds. Imagine that you hear the sound made by a lion and a zebra. You can recognize these two sounds because it’s in your memory. But in most cases, you will think the situation is that the lion is chasing after the zebra, not in the reverse way. The strange thing is that the sound won’t provide you with sufficient information and you can still make that guess. I guess this might be the brain’s function to combine our personal life experience with the sounds we hear. In ancient China, one of the most popular adopted by the army to infer whether there is an attack in the night is to hear the sound of the horse running. This has also something to do with the symbolic meaning of the sound. While in some cases, the symbolic meaning may also be a distraction. Imagine that you hear a scream of your life. The first thing comes to your mind that there might be something terrible happens. And you hurry to check what’s going on. It is possible that she receives some gifts unexpected and she screams due to her happiness. So the symbolic meaning of sound is something appealing to me.

Johnny