How Hearing Happens

What Are We Dealing With?

When Does Hearing Begin?

• In the womb• Babies only hours old are able to differentiate

between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.

• Pacific Lutheran University (2013, January 2). Language learning begins in utero, study finds

Before Birth!http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130102083615.htm

“The study shows that the newborn has the capacity to learn and remember elementary sounds of their language from their mother during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy (the sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are intact at 30 weeks of gestational age).”

Sound and Learninghttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130102083615.htm

"This is a stunning finding," said Kuhl. "We thought infants were 'born learning' but now we know they learn even earlier. They are not phonetically naïve at birth."

How Do We Hear?Electrophysiological response to voice

• Left - vocal sound signal entering the ear (middle)

• Right - brain electrical activity related to voice (red curve),

• bird songs (green curve) and

• environmental sounds (blue curve).

http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/archive/2009/091019-pr-brain-responds-to-human-voice-in-fifth-of-second.aspx

How Sound Enters Your Brain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv_-z4iq4Tc

Where Hearing Connectshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_auditory_cortex

(Where Vision Connects)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cortex

What Voices Tell Ushttp://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=1865

“we routinely extract from voices a wealth of socially-relevant information

in what constitutes a more primitive, and probably more universal,

non-linguistic mode of communication.”

Live Sound Tells Us …http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=1865

• Where positioned• Gender • Nationality• Approximate age • Identity types• Speaker’s mood and affective state• Fairly detailed picture of the type of social

interaction

We All Hear Differently

• Like seeing, without glasses

• Like dyslexia

Audio Processing Disorder

• Problems carrying out multi-step directions given orally,

• Language difficulties (e.g., confuse syllable sequences, etc.)

• problems determining the direction of sounds

More Audio Processing Disorder

• difficulty perceiving differences between speech sounds

• confusing similar sounds such as "hat" with "bat", "there" with "where", etc.

And More

• Background noise, such as the sound of a radio, television or a noisy bar make it difficult to understand - problems separating out “strands” of sounds – groups talking, voice vs radio, etc

• Using a telephone without visuals - need to lip read, read body language, and use eye contact

Listening - a Collage of Skills

• Predicting • Guessing - Ever ‘replay’ what someone said in

your head - and then understood?• Reflection – commenting in your head as you

listen, evaluating, noticing• Understanding intonation – paralanguage -

'paralanguage' is often used to refer to non-verbal elements of speech - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication

More Listening Skills

• Recognizing connectors - https://www.dlsweb.rmit.edu.au/lsu/content/4_writingskills/writing_tuts/linking_LL/sentence.html

• Recognizing discourse markers – Once upon a time … etc.

About Recorded Sounds

• Replay possible• Controlled layering of sound• aural composition closer to Levi-Strauss’s

“bricolage” or a visual collage than to the finely detailed edited text

• ephemeral - can’t trap an aural frame of sound as you can a visual frame of a video

Hearing and Listening• Hearing starts before birth• We get a great deal of information from voices• Audio Processing Disorder information and

audience needs• Listening skills• Recorded sounds are experienced differently

from ‘live’ sounds• Editing audio is different from editing text – a

mix rather than individual bits