Sound is all around us. We don’t need any particular talent to use it. Doctors tell us that we can hear sounds in the womb.¹

We can make sounds with a melody using our voices and we can make sounds with a beat using our hands. We can hear sounds with our ears, and we can also feel sounds when something has a lot of impact.

There are a lot of similarities between sound and pictures – artists can make music with sounds and pictures with light. And most of us who are just learning to be artists at something, well, we either don’t pay much attention to the details and do OK, or, we are learning.

And that is where we pick up the story. To be able to judge sound, to know if it is the best possible for your clients in the auditorium – or at least acceptable – is a task worthy of your interest and study.

We should remember that there are several people who have hearing issues, which means that they don’t fit into every category of hearing. We will go through these issues later(…in The Other-Abled, and You lessons), but for now we’ll just listen to a philosophy lesson

OK; Next, Good Vibrations

For a simple definition, “Sound” is what we hear. But actually every sound involves hundreds of steps. These steps begin with a motion that takes place at one point. The drummer hits the drum, and it vibrates. The bell gets hit and it vibrates. We push air up our throats and make it vibrate.

We can’t see it, but you can visualize it by thinking about it like a pebble that is thrown into a pond.

Very quickly, that one motion starts a series of motions that spread out as waves. Like the circular wave on the water, sound is a wave that spreads out from the source.

There are some differences with the water comparison though. The first is that we see the pond surface as a flat surface. Our sound wave is different – it goes out in all directions from a speaker. It is similar to the way that a light goes out from a flame – from the top and bottom and all sides at once, every angle to every corner. The second difference is that the spreading wave, that energy spreading out from the speaker, is pushing on air. Air acts differently than water.

But the main thing is true – a wave of sound and a wave on water and a wave of light all allow energy to get to our ears and eyes.

Eventually the energy of the wave reaches our ears. It then goes inside the ears and finally (through a process that is so sophisticated that it seems like it must be magic), the wave motion turns into electricity. That energy goes down some nerves.  That new energy wave of electricity transmits what we heard, that original motion, to the brain for analysis.

Sometimes the word Sound and the word “Audio” seem like they mean the same thing. But they can be different. We will say that “audio” is a type of sound that is being played through some equipment. This is the sound that we hear in the movie auditorium.

Grammar in English is complicated though, so that statement is not always true. We might say that the sound of his voice onscreen was pleasant – we won’t say, the ‘audio’ of his voice. And, we won’t say that the voice of the singer on the street had amazing ‘audio’. Instead, we would say that the ‘sound’ of his or her voice was amazing.

Whether the sound is natural or reproduced, the path to our ears is complex. You don’t need to know about most of that complexity, just like we don’t need to know about most of the complexity of the sound speaker on the wall.  …or, is that supposed to be “audio speaker”?

But as a professional-in-training, you should understand enough so that you aren’t fooled by something that isn’t immediately obvious. You should be able to respond correctly if an audience member says something about the sound. For example, you could ask a appropriate question that gets a good answer which will give the tech better information, so they can fix the issue more quickly.

Because that is part of your job: To tell the technician about negative changes in the sound – a rattle, a hum, no sound, distorted sound, sound that isn’t balanced (too much or too little from one side, for example)…and where…and if possible, why.

So, we’ll start slow. We’ll cover some basics. And after you hear a test DCP (See: What Does It Mean: DCP) in an auditorium a few times – or 10 or 20 times – you can review the material in this lesson (and the next) to refine your knowledge. Perhaps you will find questions while you work that were presented when you studied, but didn’t seem important before you refined your ability to notice things. When we do this, we are learning to evaluate by significance. So, get out there and find those things that are significant, and find out those things you want to know more about.

And, please ask questions. Because no one was born with this data – everyone had to learn this. Much of it is new. Much of it is very new, and almost all of it has been refined very recently as science and technology has progressed. So, good luck to you, and good luck to us all~!