Emily Thompson is one of the best thinkers out there on how we hear and the relationship between aurality and culture. Her lecture on "The Soundscape of Modernity" is now available on video from MIT Press which also published her book, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. I came across this today on Facebook (a common source for some of my most interesting thoughts of the day) and it made me think about last night's Nova program which featured the VoCoder and showed the ways that it can be used to enhance a voice but also to keep someone tone-deaf on key by artificially manufacturing the right pitch.

Thompson makes the point that even such "givens" as pitch are in fact culturally specific. We hear differently depending on what technologies we hear through as well as through the conventions of our time and place. It's a fascinating example of perception and culture, as always, co-existing and co-forming one another, mind and brain in tandem.

Here's the link: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/19

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