Sound must vary over time to hold listener attention

Evidence

Variation of some kind is needed during any sound in order to hold the listener’s attention. The acoustic communication of new information to a listener, whether speech, music, environmental sounds or warning signals from a natural or person-made source, requires that the input signal varies in some way with time. Such variation may be of the pitch, loudness or timbre of the sound. The popularity of postprocessing effects, particularly chorus (see Chapter 7), either as a feature on synthesizers themselves or as a studio effects unit, reflects this. However, while these can make sounds more interesting to listen to by time variation imposed by adding postprocessing, such an addition rarely does anything to improve the overall naturalness of a synthesized sound. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1486

Variation of some kind is needed during any sound in order to hold the listener’s attention. The acoustic communication of new information to a listener, whether speech, music, environmental sounds or warning signals from a natural or person-made source, requires that the input signal varies in some way with time. Such variation may be of the pitch, loudness or timbre of the sound. The popularity of postprocessing effects, particularly chorus (see Chapter 7), either as a feature on synthesizers themselves or as a studio effects unit, reflects this. However, while these can make sounds more interesting to listen to by time variation imposed by adding postprocessing, such an addition rarely does anything to improve the overall naturalness of a synthesized sound. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1486

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to attention and silence research — the counterpart is that a perfectly steady sound (or silence) fails to communicate new information, resonating with earlier reading on silence as positive absence. — connects to: Game audio is dynamic or adaptive rather than fixed linear content; All information-bearing sound must vary over time; Hearing is highly sensitive to temporal changes in sound — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 685 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle for a personal essay: why music and speech command attention through change, and what that says about listening to silence.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1486

Broader Connections

• Hearing is highly sensitive to temporal changes in sound #corroborates (0.78) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 685