User:JadeSofie/sandbox

Hearing and Listening

Two significant categories to what we hear and pay attention to are natural and technological sounds (Schafer 145). It has been found, however, that the proportion of nature sounds heard and noticed has decreased over the past two centuries for Europe, from 43% to 20%, but not for North America, where it has stayed around 50%. Additionally, the proportion of technological sounds has stayed around 35% for Europe, but decreased in North America. While technological increases have not been sonically noticed, the decrease in silence has been noticed, from 19% to 9%.

For the idea of listening, objects can be considered auditorily as compared to visually. The objects that are able to be experienced by sight and by sound can be thought of in a venn diagram, with mute and visible objects in the vision category, with aural and invisible objects in the sound category, and aural and visible objects in the overlapping category.Objects that do not fall into a specific category can be considered beyond the horizons of sound and sight. The common denominator for aural objects is movement.

Three modes of listening have been recognized; casual listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening. Casual listening, the most common, consists of listening in order to gather ideas about its source. Sound in this case is informational and can be used to recognize voices, determine distance, or understand differences between humans and machines. Semantic listening is when a sound is not only heard but also processed. When a sound is given meaning and context, as seen in speech and fluent dialogue. Reduced listening focuses on the traits of the sound itself regardless of cause and meaning.