1. How Hearing Happens
What Are We Dealing With?

2. 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

3. 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).”

4. Sound and Learning
http://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."

5. 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/2009/091019pr-brain-responds-to-human-voice-in-fifth-ofsecond.aspx

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

7. Where Hearing Connects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_auditory_cortex

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

9. What Voices Tell Us
http://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.”

10. 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

11. We All Hear Differently
• Like seeing, without glasses
• Like dyslexia

12. 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

13. More Audio Processing Disorder
• difficulty perceiving differences between
speech sounds
• confusing similar sounds such as "hat" with
"bat", "there" with "where", etc.

14. 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

15. 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 nonverbal elements of speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication

16. More Listening Skills
• Recognizing connectors https://www.dlsweb.rmit.edu.au/lsu/content/
4_writingskills/writing_tuts/linking_LL/senten
ce.html
• Recognizing discourse markers – Once upon a
time … etc.

17. 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

18. 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