(Roughly) Daily

Sound: it’s so ubiquitous that, unless we’re momentarily thrilled or annoyed by it, we tend to take it for granted. But what is it? Tim Urban to the rescue…

We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter. The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave [as per the illustration above]…

Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of air pressure waves. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?…

The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a miracle…

And so much more: “Everything You Should Know About Sound,” from @waitbutwhy.

See also: 32 Sounds

*  Since there is no real silence,
Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all memory.”

–Dejan Stojanović

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As we listen, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that Alam Ara was released. the first “talkie” (feature film with a sound track), it birthed the modern Indian film business, and set the high-romance, all-singing, all-dancing template for what we now know as Bollywood films (which sell more tickets worldwide than Hollywood films– though with lower grosses, as admission prices are generally lower). Sadly, no copy of Alam Ara survives; in 2017, the British Film Institute joined most Indian film scholars in declaring it the most important of all lost films produced in India.

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