Sonic Doing&Thinking Week12 – Feedback

I have found a lot of very interesting points from this week’s exercise.

I used the software LS, which allowed me in front of the computer to hear the sounds picked up by my mobile phone placed outside. I heard neighbours talking, cars on the road, the wind and the sound of the wind hitting the microphone, and the alarm of a police car. What struck me as most strange was the very small metallic or electrical sound. I walked out onto the balcony and I noticed that the ambience felt different. I felt that the range of sound I hear through my own ears is narrower than the range of sound I hear in front of the computer. The main thing was that very subtle sound. The sound was indeed there, but it was so small that I think I would have ignored it if I hadn’t purposely sought it out. I wondered if it was because our ears are not very sensitive to some high frequency sounds and therefore do not catch such sounds easily.

Afterwards I did another exercise in the living room. The high frequency current sounds that I could hear with my headphones were not audible when I took them off. I could hear my housemate talking in the room and I could hear the content clearly by adjusting the output or input volume. But when I took the headphones off I could only hear my housemate talking, but not the content of the conversation. 

To sum up my thoughts, tools can actually help us hear a lot of sounds that we wouldn’t otherwise hear, as they sometimes have a wider range than our ears.

Before I got my authorized account, I tried to do this exercise by using my computer to make an internet call to my mobile phone, but I unfortunately found that this method simply did not work. The ambient sound was so small and all that could be heard was the wind outside, and that too very quietly. I have since pondered why this is the case, after all it is the same equipment. In the following I offer my guess that the reception data used by the software is not the same. The software may be able to make the phone a different microphone by changing some parameters. I think that the receiver side of the internet call is more like a Sony Uwp-D11( a directional microphone). And the SL’s receiver is like a spherical microphone, perfect for picking up ambient sound.