Sound

A falling tree itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground. These vibrations become sound only if something special is present to receive and translate them: say, an ear connected to a brain.

Barrett argues that sound is not a property of the physical world but a construction of the brain, requiring a perceiving nervous system to transform pressure-wave into experience — a constructionist epistemological claim central to her theory of emotion.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The impact of these muscles on the perceived acoustic environment is to markedly attenuate low-frequency sounds, which facilitates the extraction of sounds in a higher frequency band associated with human voice and other mammalian vocalizations.

Porges demonstrates that middle-ear musculature actively filters the acoustic environment, privileging the frequency range of conspecific vocalizations and thereby linking the neural processing of sound directly to the social engagement system.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Music and music therapy strategies may provide an alternate portal to the social engagement system and avoid the initial face-to-face interactions that may be misinterpreted as threat by a traumatized individual.

Porges proposes that prosodic sound and music can bypass defensive neuroception and access the ventral vagal social engagement system in trauma treatment, positioning sound as a therapeutic portal distinct from verbal dialogue.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

when he produces musical sound, however, he dissolves the phenomenal world, as it were, into its original unity; the world of maya disappears before the magic of music.

Nietzsche distinguishes musical sound as a metaphysical act that dissolves the principium individuationis, expressing the Will directly rather than through the phenomenal mediation of gesture or image.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

śabda brahman, that is that sound which is one with Brahman. And, in that śabda brahmaṇi, whoever has taken a bath, taken a dip . . . he enters in the state of paraṃ brahma.

The Kashmir Shaivite tradition presents sound (śabda brahman / anāhata) not as a sensory phenomenon but as the vibratory identity of Brahman itself, and contemplation of its unbroken continuity as a direct path to liberation.

Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the primal Silence antecedent to sound, containing sound as potential . . . this Silence that is no silence but to be heard resounding through all things, whether of waking, dream, or dreamless night.

Campbell articulates a mythic-phenomenological position in which primordial Silence is not the absence of sound but its transcendent ground, the Void from which all acoustic and phenomenal reality emerges, identified with the syllable AUM.

Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Actual sound requires for its occurrence (i, ii) two such bodies and (iii) a space between them; for it is generated by an impact. Hence it is impossible for one body only to generate a sound.

Aristotle establishes the physical ontology of sound as relational impact — requiring two solid bodies, an intervening medium, and a receiving organ — providing the physicalist baseline against which all later spiritual and constructionist accounts are positioned.

Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), -350thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

they would have been discovering that certain kinds of sounds—instrumental and vocal—produced predictably agreeable or disagreeable effects. In other words, the emotive response caused by a wind sound . . . would have been a welcome discovery of soothing or seductive effects.

Damasio situates the origin of music-making in the discovery that specific sounds reliably produce affective states, grounding the emotional power of sound in evolutionary homeostatic function.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

when he concentrates on that collective sound, there in that string instrument . . . when that collective way is being functioned, there you have scope to enter in samādhi.

Swami Lakshmanjoo teaches that concentrated attention on the unified collective sound of multiple simultaneous musical tones — apprehended as one — constitutes a tantric technique for accessing samādhi.

Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Those patterns go out into space. They envelop people. Surround them in texture. It is beyond language. Beyond thought. Beyond religion. It is like a cashmere blanket of sound.

Keltner’s witness testimony frames collective musical sound as an awe-eliciting experience that transcends cognitive and religious categories, enveloping the listener in a felt relational field.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

fundamental level usually involves sounds that are sudden, loud, dissonant, or feature fast temporal patterns. Sudden sounds make sense: many of our instinctive attention mechanisms are drawn to any unexpected sensory change.

Burnett maps the neurological arousal properties of different acoustic qualities — suddenness, loudness, dissonance, tempo — to instinctive attentional and emotional responses, grounding musical affect in evolutionary threat-detection systems.

Burnett, Dean, The emotional brain lost and found in the science of, 2023supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The only distinctions mentioned—high and low, smooth and harsh, loud and soft—are connected with the motions of particles. Nothing is said about the differences of quality or timbre which we detect in our sensations.

Cornford’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus notes that Plato’s acoustics reduce all distinctions of sound to motions of particles, conspicuously omitting timbre — the qualitative dimension that later traditions would find most psychically significant.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a succession of projectiles, which would account for the continued humming, in contrast with the abrupt noise produced (say) when a book is dropped on the floor.

The commentary reconstructs Archytas’s and Plato’s proto-wave theory of sustained musical tone as a series of discrete impulse-projectiles, anticipating the frequency model of acoustics while remaining within a corpuscular physical framework.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In one case, Ficino was interested in using the sounds of music in order to affect the soul. Music was another art of memory or imagination, a way of getting the soul in touch with various kinds of spirit.

Moore explicates Ficino’s therapeutic use of musical sound as a spiritus-medicine — a technology for aligning the soul with planetary and elemental influences through the medium of specifically chosen acoustic qualities.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The pure sound associations show, with one exception, inverse relation between the two groups . . . it is just this fact, that the pure sound associations are repressed under normal conditions, that has the greatest significance.

Jung’s word-association research reveals that sound-based reactions (rhyme, alliteration, consonance) are normally suppressed by conscious rational inhibition but emerge under distraction, indicating their connection to unconscious affective material.

Jung, C. G., Experimental Researches, 1904supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the void is correctly called responsible for hearing. For the air is believed to be a void and this it is that produces hearing, whenever it is moved as a continuous and unified thing.

Aristotle identifies continuous air — conceived as a unified medium rather than a discrete void — as the necessary vehicle of sound transmission, and establishes the homology between external and internal air as the mechanism of auditory perception.

Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

sound at this level is manifest in a range of sound in musical notes such as do, ma, etc., of the Hindu music scale . . . sound, touch, etc., as manifest in gross form.

Bryant’s commentary situates gross sound as the tanmātra of ether differentiated into the full empirical spectrum of musical tones, situating acoustic experience within the Sāṃkhya-Yoga cosmological hierarchy of subtle to gross manifestation.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The sound (phōnē) that we emit is one, but, at the same time, unlimited, in all of us and in each of us. Knowing the number and nature of these elements is what makes us ‘grammarians’.

Benveniste, via Socrates on the Philebus, frames the analytical reduction of the infinite field of vocal sound into countable, nameable elements as the founding act of both grammar and music theory.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Vocal bursts are the common sounds that populate our speech and convey emotion without words . . . Research shows that when hearing a vocal burst, the listener picks up the speaker’s emotion correctly with a high degree of accuracy.

Dana applies polyvagal theory to demonstrate that pre-linguistic vocal sounds (sighs, groans, affirmative sounds) are a primary channel of autonomic emotional communication, operating below the level of semantic language.

Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

From blobs of sound like itstimefordinner . . . infants learn which syllables are paired together more frequently and therefore likely to be part of a single word.

Barrett uses statistical learning from undifferentiated sound streams as her primary example of how the brain constructs bounded categories from continuous sensory flux, illustrating predictive construction at the most foundational acoustic level.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the plus differences in the group of sound reactions again show a more significant increase in educated women than in uneducated.

Jung’s tabular data show that educated women under experimental distraction produce a greater increase in sound-based word associations than other demographic groups, suggesting differential suppression of sound-reaction pathways by educational conditioning.

Jung, C. G., Experimental Researches, 1904aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →