Due to public transport complications, I wasn’t able to attend the week 4 lectorial. But I did, however, manage to listen to the recording of Rachel’s section whilst following the slides.

I’m finding this week’s topic of sound to be particularly interesting, because I haven’t actually experimented with it as much as I have with visuals (even though I did say in a previous post that a majority of my course last year was focused on sound mixing). I’m finding that I’m still continuing to learn new things about this topic.

Some of the main things that I took from this lectorial were:

• The difference between hearing and listening – listening requires concentration, a main focal point, and is completely intentional, whereas hearing is our ability to perceive something by ear and it’s something that just happens.
• The definition of sound – sound waves are created by physical vibrations that set molecules in motion
• Components of sound – there are five musical components of sound; pitch, timbre, harmonics, loudness, and rhythm.
• Types of sound – auditory experience can be classified into three classes; sounds and their attributes, sources of sound, and things beyond sounds and their sources. We also explored the different types of sound which are speech, music, and unwanted noise.

Since I was trying to avoid just copying and pasting my notes that I took, these were just basic summaries of what I actually learned.

So over the next rest of my life, I’m probably going to start being more aware of my audible surroundings, and keep an open mind to different ambiances.