Episode 1 Do you know sound?You hear sound. You make sound. You compare one sound to another. You evaluate something based on the sound it makes. You make beautiful sounds to enchant others. Just as seeing is believing, hearing is knowing. We are not afraid to say that we know something or someone because we can hear them. We usually know our limits. Observing objects and nature is different from knowing physics. Speaking English perfectly is one thing, but being an English teacher is another. When it comes to sound, however, the boundary between arts and sciences is blurry, and we don't even know it.
Episode 6 Breaking a wine glass with her voiceYou might have heard a story of a strong, high-pitched soprano voice breaking a wine glass. How is it possible? Does a human voice have enough power to destroy an object? No. Not even close--we need 100 or 1000 times greater energy than that in a human voice. The key is the resonance. It is not the energy of her voice per se but the right frequency that breaks the glass. The object is destined to be destroyed if it is repeatedly agitated with that particular frequency. Don't underestimate a woman's power, it's not her physical strength but how she uses it.
Episode 17 Loud not necessarily intenseA car hitting another car--crash! A 100-mph pitch coming to the catcher's mitt--thud! A woman slapping her cheating boyfriend--smack! In reality, despite our intuition, you shouldn't rely only on the loudness at the moment of the impact. Fatal crashes often don't make loud sound. A good catcher can make a thundering sound with a 50-mph pitch. It is only the emotion that gets hurt by a distinct high-pitch slap in the face. Every day, people misjudge the intensity of the situation just based on the volume of the sound generated. Heard of silent but deadly?
Episode 20 Can you hear your own voice?If you listen to a recording of your own voice, for example, your voicemail greeting, you might find it awkward because it doesn't sound like yourself. That's because you normally hear your voice through vibration of the head (i.e., the "bone conduction" sound), which alters the spectrum from its natural version that everyone else hears. When you hear yourself as you speak, there's no way to get around this distortion. Don't say you know yourself--there are several things about yourself that are very difficult for you to know without a bias. Your voice is one of them.
Episode 43 We are bound to be deafLife expectancy continually improves. A baby born today has a greater chance of becoming a centenarian than someone born in 1950's. Thanks to medical breakthroughs and better preventive care in recent years, seniors today enjoy better overall health than their predecessors, and the longevity of the general public will continue to extend. Unfortunately, there is no improvement in hearing health--actually the opposite, due to our love for loud music. Most people accept age-related hearing loss as their fate. Fortunately, they died before their hearing loss progressed further. Now, seniors today, with many more years to live, have a good chance of going deaf.
Episode 53 Reverberation is magicThe sound we hear in a room or building comes with numerous reflections from the walls or the ceiling. We have acquired the ability to scan the environment with auditory cues from echoes and reverberation and tiny pitch changes of the sounds as we move relative to the sound sources. Even though these effects are not the sound itself, we treat them as essential part of the sound. Simple audio effects such as reverberation, chorus, or flange, can turn a regular voice into God's holy sound or Devil's mumble-jumble at the whim of an audio engineer.
Episode 58 Foley artistsWho says movies bring you the reality? Movies don't deal with true reality. It's only storytelling, after all. Most of the sound you hear in movies are not real but created by Foley artists. These masters of fake arts manipulate our perception. Magicians at least receive a round of applause from the audience. Not Foley artists. I would like to give them the credit they deserve, but don't know how. As the actor crushes the villain's bone, they were just breaking a celery to make the sound. In order not to ruin the movie, they better stay behind the curtain.
Episode 65 Perfect pitch: a flashy wordThe ability to name the musical note upon hearing a tone, or vocalizing a pitch of a given note without a reference, is revered as a marvel. Wonder stories spread easily: once you hear it you willingly propagate it to others, or you originate one yourself: "My kid has perfect pitch!" In reality, we don't verify those claims, because there's no real value in ruining others' bragging rights. Granted, it's an extraordinary ability found in 1 in 10,000 people, but is it a prerequisite for the musical talent? Nope. Relative pitch is more important and useful for musical skills; but it's not as flashy.
Episode 78 Phonetics lost. Miserably.Building a machine or computer program that understands human speech was a dream for a long time. Decades ago, scientists and engineers clung to phonetics research to tackle this problem, thinking that a very good understanding of the acoustic properties of speech and how they are mapped into perception would direct us to the solution. Fast forward--despite the time, manpower and dollars invested, such efforts bore no fruit. Instead, approaches largely ignoring phonetics and human perception lead to the creation of our new friends, Siri, whom many of us cannot live without. We phoneticians lost. Miserably.
Episode 79 Then, what good is phonetics?Oh, please. No one can devalue phonetics. Forget about Siri. Knowledge of phonetics is important in many areas. Phonetics gives us a foundation on how speech sounds are produced, how we visualize them and analyze features, and how they lead to perception. However, we must know what we know and we don't. Our knowledge of phonetics is mostly limited to exemplary cases--analyses of enunciated pronunciation and its reception under good listening conditions. Everyone hears and understands real speech which is far from those textbook examples. But no one is able to explain how we do it. Maybe Siri can.
Episode 86 How do we tell a man's voice from a woman's?We do it primarily based on the pitch of the voice. But the pitch alone is not sufficient, because its ranges for males and females overlap substantially: 80 to 200 Hz for males and 150 to 300 Hz for females. Additional acoustic features we utilize are the range of formants and the degree of "breathiness," which are based on the biological differences in the vocal tract length and in the muscle strength around the glottis between sexes. Yet, those features are not definitive, either. The boundary between man and woman is more psychological than physical.
Episode 87 Voice, masculinized or feminizedDespite the blurry boundary between men's and women's voices in nature, our perception of gender is categorical and dichotic. We set ideal man's or woman's voices in our mind from society and do our best to put ourselves into the right category. Men speak with assertive tones and monotonous pitch contours; women enjoy making their speech expressive with colorful tones. We make a great deal of efforts, albeit unconsciously, to masculinize or feminize our voices and overcome "physical handicap," for example, being short and high-pitched for guys or being tall and low-pitched for gals. Sex is what we are born with; gender is what we live with.
Episode 88 Voice of transgender peopleFemale-to-male transgender people produce a male voice easily as they develop masculine features in their larynx through hormonal therapies. But male-to-female transgender people typically face a greater challenge in feminizing their voices because female hormone injections will not shrink their already developed Adam's apples. Yet, some post-puberty male-to-female transgender people successfully develop their female voices through voice therapy. They learn to shift their voice register with higher formants and naturalize it with other feminine voice features, e.g., lively intonation, or breathiness. Interestingly, a regular guy can make a girl's voice perfectly through practice without hormone injections; but the opposite is not possible.
Episode 99 Audiographic memoryYou might have forgotten his name or what he looked like; but upon recognizing his voice, you know he was your classmate decades ago. A seemingly simple sound connects you to endless chains of memories. A train horn evokes your memories far more than just a train. Your childhood favorite tune brings back the names of your buddies. A bird's song takes you back to the house you grew up in. Memories through sounds are more vivid than those through images because sounds linger in your mind longer. Memories are traces of your life; sounds are staples of your memory.
Episode 100 The best thing you can do to a dying person--say something nice Senses of tactile, taste, and smell might have already gone when the heart is about to stop beating and the body starts to shut down. Finally, he closes his eyes--the vision is out. What's left? He can probably still hear, even if he seems unconscious. Play his favorite piece of music softly. Whisper something nice to his ear. No need to make it fancy. He just feels uneasy and anxious about the journey after departure. Hearing your voice will comfort him. He would appreciate it for the rest of his life, which may be an eternity.
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