Tag: Acoustics

The Stealthy Sounds of Cocktail Parties

Posted on by Gautam Pemmaraju

by Gautam Pemmaraju

Tuning of the World

A month or so ago, at a dinner party, my ears locked into a conversation between two men from a reasonable distance away. Drinks and hors d'oeuvres were still being served; glasses clinked in cheering, and the chinaware made all sorts of bright, transient sounds as they were picked up, put down, or met with cutlery. There was soft, unobtrusive music serving as a unifying background, festooned ever so often by exclamations, polite laughter, and other speech. On occasion a chair would be moved— possibly the only abrasive sound to this genteel soundscape. Ice cubes were dropped gingerly into my drink, not enough though for to not make the slightest of sounds (or did I imagine that?). As snatches of sentences reached me from various sources, I was able to telescopically isolate the conversation that I had quite unintentionally, unwittingly, chosen to eavesdrop upon. They spoke of a fairly prominent public figure and his current whereabouts. Perhaps it was his name that had drawn my attention. His libertine ways, peccadilloes so to speak, were the topic of conversation; in particular, there was mention of some frolicking in a bathtub filled with champagne that had apparently made quite a, well, splash. Some boisterous laughter ensued, filling the room with its force. And just like that, the sonic space had changed, and as I gathered my wits, my ears shifted focus seamlessly to a friend who sat down next to me. “Cheers!” she exclaimed and we clinked glasses. It seems now to me a sensory rupture of sorts—my eavesdropping was barely a minute, and yet, it seemed oddly long. That it was a relatively ‘hi-fi' party—marked by a more favourable signal to noise ratio—helped matters for it was easier to pick out individual, pellucid sounds that may have otherwise been masked in a different setting, In hindsight though, it all seems now a trick of the mind, a temporal illusion experienced by a disembodied double and flagged by auditory cues. Much like cinema.

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The Pellucid Sound of Rain

Posted on by Gautam Pemmaraju

by Gautam Pemmaraju

The Bombay monsoon has finally fallen into character, after a destitute June. As I was falling asleep to the sound of heavy rain a few nights ago, my attention was once again momentarily drawn to the dense ecology of sounds that the droplets made as they struck several surfaces. There was the light, wind-swept tympanic percussion on the window pane, there were the lone droplets on the balcony ledge, the corpulent plops upon the leaves of the potted plants in the balcony, and there was the dense tumescent swoosh, the ‘white noise' of the environment, amidst several discrete sounds of varying time and frequency that I could distinguish in a short audition. Perhaps it was no longer that a few minutes. It felt much longer and so it is when we enter these strange, somewhat unsettling meditative states.

Rain sounds are packaged for commercial use as a sleep therapy device and a mood relaxant. White noise machines are commonly found, and used, although their efficacy is a matter of debate. White noise is generally understood to be a noise signal wherein the entire spectrum of frequencies is at the same intensity. Much like a diaphanous acoustic blanket, the signal has a physical consistency—a sort of drone character, so to speak. The ‘colour of sound', or the ‘colour' of a noise signal is an underlying concept here. Just as in music, we are able to describe and attribute ‘tone colour', what is also known as timbre, to a specific sound. In noise, the colour of a signal refers to the attributes of its frequency spectrum, in particular, its power. White noise is analogous to white light, characterized by a ‘flat frequency spectrum' in a narrow range, and in music and acoustics the signal is understood as a hissing sound. The use of a white noise generator or machine, for whatever purpose one may choose, is a process of ‘sound masking' wherein a sound/noise of the immediate environment is mitigated, cloaked, or ‘masked' by the addition of a natural or artificial sound (such as a white or a pink noise). Generally, the intention is to make the environment more acoustically pleasing, more amenable, relaxed, and to ironically, suggest a sense of quietude. So essentially, in order to mitigate, acoustically shadow, or conceal unwanted sounds that annoy or distract us, we employ noise. In many ways and iterations, we are essentially learning to cope with and negotiate noise (and noises), for noise, is ubiquitous. Actually, we seem to be perpetually learning noise.

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Reverberance, Reverence, Deliverance: Echoing the Otherworld

Posted on by Gautam Pemmaraju

by Gautam Pemmaraju

Suave locus voci resonat conclusus

(How sweetly the enclosed space responds to the voice)

—Horace, Satires I, iv, 76 (in Doyle, P, Echo and Reverb:

Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900 – 1960; 2005)

The whispering gallery that runs along the inner periphery of the dome of Gol Gumbaz, the mausoleum of the medieval Bijapur sultan Muhammad Adil Shah (1626 – 56 CE) is an acoustic marvel. Multiple echoes of up to ten in number can be heard in the dome on a single clap. And a reasonably soft whisper can be heard across a distance of a hundred and thirty feet. The tourists visiting the place are mostly prone to whoop, shout, and clap with great enthusiasm, overwhelming the dome with dense sonic information. At quiet times though one can savour its rich, amplified reverberance—the timbre, colour and tone of the spoken word assumes an elevated quality, as if it were imbued by the sheen of something beyond earthly artifice.

Such sonic modulations appear to us to be of a higher order, sanctified by primordial forces. And in our own mimetic appropriations, of sermons and speeches, chants and songs, drones and dirges, we seek to texturize our words with an otherworldly aura. The use of delay effects in sound recording allows us then to ritualistically edify our anxieties and inadequacies and transpose them into reverberant solemnity.

The prosaic use of delay effects in recorded sound—echo and reverberation—has its place in modern times, but the phenomenon has for long resided in the realm of mystical experience. The Greco-Roman mythical character Echo, a nymph condemned to repeat all that she hears, is a tragic figure by all accounts. Rebuffed by Narcissus, the heartbroken Oread hides herself in woods, caves and mountain cliffs. She withers away there in loneliness, her flesh wasting away and bones turning into stone till all that is left is her voice. In this reduced, etheric spectral state, all she can do is to reply to anyone who calls out to her.

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Close Miking Consciousness: Imaginary Experiments with Space, Place, Shapes & Mics

Posted on by Gautam Pemmaraju

by Gautam Pemmaraju

In sound and music production, close miking refers to the practice of placing the microphone close to the sound source – from 1 inch to 1 foot – as opposed to distant or ambient miking. There are several kinds of microphone techniques, countless kinds of specialty microphones to suit a wide range of purposes, and given the sheer complexity of the human relationship to sound, the applicability of technology (in what situations we record sound and with what) assumes great import. It is a pretty vast creative domain and is shaped by the imagination of those at work. Close miking suggests here a greater intimacy with process and perception. In order to extrapolate more or finer detail, we go closer to the sound – physically, psychologically and metaphorically. It is through a more intimate engagement with sound that we then ascribe character to it – we discuss texture, tonality, timbre, colour, and taste even. We use every other sense to describe how a sound sounds.

One elemental way we can understand hearing is as a function of Signal to Noise or SNR (see this). When noise escalates or overwhelms, we instinctively adapt. Needless to say, in cities, with a profusion of countless impulses, signals and provocations, we are in a perpetual condition of negotiating this balance, whereby, we recalibrate, reassign priority, and in many ways, incessantly rehear our environment. We find ways to suppress background noise and achieve comprehension and intelligibility. What do we then hear in our heads as opposed to what we hear out of our heads? Such a question is inextricably linked to our broader, composite perception – it informs speech and vision. The McGurk-McDonald Effect (see this BBC Horizon video clip) underscores these complex relationships, whereby, when one phoneme was dubbed over the video of a different one spoken out, an entirely third one was perceived when the video was played back.

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