Mary Roach, like many other sharp minds, writes comments on a wide variety of subjects. She, like Kathryn Schulz and many other of my favorites, is a helpful and trustworthy thinker. I memorize the names of such people since they help me enjoy life and they benefit me. So, when I saw that Mary Roach had an endorsement of "The Universal Sense" on the book's cover, I bought it right off. As usual, a good judge of ideas was right again: it is indeed a very "good book for anyone with ears."
I have made quite a few tweets that consist of a short comment and a link to the passage I was referring to. Some books, like Seth Horowitz's "The Universal Sense", have a comment that is noteworthy on just about every page. He knows a great deal about sound and discusses the general idea of vibration everywhere, which means there is sound everywhere. I have hearing loss so I can't hear some of the vibrations that happen around me but others can. Many animals can hear in different ranges of sound than I can. Horowitz makes clear that bats find their insect prey using echolocation and extremely loud bursts of sound in a range that my ears are not built to detect so their noisy cries don't register with me.
When he discusses the psychology of sound, he refers to silent movies being accompanied by piano or organ play in the theater to evoke emotional responses to the film, in the time before having talkies was possible. Some filmmakers like to play music while characters are talking, often at a volume that obscures the speech, at least for me. Bugs me!
We have music faculty locally who specialize in the creation and history of film music, which Horowitz says is an effective way of adding emotion to a film and supplementing what we know and feel about a given character in a story. He mentions music used when Darth Vader is coming and the very successful sound track in the movie "Jaws". He also discusses the canned laugh tracks which are no longer as much in fashion but which did tend to affect listeners, get them laughing and leaving many with the impression that the show was funny.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
