week four
Notes on Children and Sound:
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics:
- Since children experience sound, even before birth, we assume that they know a great deal about it. But it is actually one of the prominent misconceptions of young children. They enter our classrooms without the development of an accurate conceptual under-standing. Some of their ideas include: There is no difference between loudness and pitch; you can see and hear a distant event at the same moment; in wind instruments, the in-strument itself vibrates not the internal air column; hitting an object harder changes its pitch; the pitch of a tuning fork will change as it "slows down," or "runs" out of energy; and sound can travel through empty space. There are also many sound-related ideas they simply cannot explain, such as how we hear.
- In its most basic definition, sound is understood as created when a wave or vibration is transmitted or frequencies are registered in human perception—in other words, both as a physical phenomenon and its perception.
- Sounds are usually classified according to the main categories of voice/speech, music, noise, ambient sound, and silence. Categories such as these can be further qualified by acoustic properties, such as volume or pitch, and other dimensions, such as rhythm, fidelity, or duration.
- Aristotle’s notion of aisthesis incorporated knowing through sensing, his ranking of the senses placed the distant senses (sight and hearing) above the proximate or lower senses of smell, taste, and touch. Such underlying assumptions have prevailed within Western philosophy, with the primacy of sight further affirmed in Enlightenment thinking, which claimed vision as the rational, scientific, and objective sense.
- Modern forms of listening have thus not only been connected to sound media technologies but traced back to professional listening techniques for “reading” sounds as signification (in sound telegraphy) and as symptoms (in modern medicine) (Sterne, 2003). In Roland Barthes’s (1991) account of listening, he establishes Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic technique as establishing a mobile listening stance that alternates between the unconscious and language, engaging both the sonorous and signifying aspects of sound
- Building on existing work, physicist Hermann von Helmholtz’s research revealed the ear as a mechanism, with a number of his instruments of measurement modeled on the ears and vocal chords.
posted by sophia # 2:00 PM 
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