Had a great conversation today with Nathan, a professional sound designer, about sound.

One highlight was contrasting the sound of a bike falling on the hardwood floor, which happened while we were talking, and the sound of rubbing your hands together. It was interesting to think about the words to describe those differently, and what physical phenomena those words corresponded with. In particular, thinking about how those sounds related to what was actually happening with the air and changes in pressure.

It was also interesting to listen to some music while seeing a few different ways of looking at the cooresponding waves. In one, time was on the x axis and we could see a vertical line moving as the music played. In another window, frequency was on the x-axis and we could see how the mix of frequencies of different waves were changing as the song played.

I liked the idea of a sound “envelope”, including “attack”, “sustain”, “decay”, and “release.”

Most interesting of all was to think about the implications of the fact that sound is our ears/brains making sense of changes in air pressure.

All in all, it was fun to start building a vocabulary for how to think about and talk about sound.