Psychoacoustics

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. The perception of
sound is known as psychoacoustics. This includes how we listen to certain
sounds, our psychological responses, and the physiological impact of music
and sound upon the human nervous system.
All sound that we perceive is psychoacoustic. As soon as sound passes
through the ears, it stops being a physical phenomena and becomes a
matter of perception. What we hear is almost by rule different from what is
actually sounding, because of the peculiarities and limitations of our hearing.
And what we hear can largely differ from what we think we are listening to,
due to the many tricks that perception plays on our awareness.
The awareness of psychoacoustics, and the possibility to apply
psychoacoustics creatively in music, took a large jump with the development
of electronic music in the early 50s. Electronic sound enabled artists to
explore a much larger spectrum of sound than was ever possible with
acoustical instruments. Electronic sound also goes far beyond the limits of
human hearing which is generally set between 16 Hz and 20 kHz (decreasing
to 16 kHz with age).
Karlheinz Stockhausen created a pivotal moment in the history of music with
his work Kontakte in 1958. The most famous moment of his piece is a potent
illustration of these connections. A high, bright tone descends in several
waves, becomes gradually louder and finally passes below the point where it
can be heard any longer as a pitch. As it crosses this threshold, it becomes
obvious that the tone consists of pulses, which continue to slow until they
become a steady beat. Once a tone passes below the threshold of 16 Hz we
stop perceiving tone, and start to hear beats.
This famous tone uncovers a fundamental understanding of our hearing. The
range of hearing was never explored in this way before this moment,
because there was no instrument that could perform this frequency range.
Up until that time, beats and tones were considered separate musical
properties and often they still are. Beats belong to the realm of rhythm and
tempo, and tones to melody and harmony. With Kontakte, Stockhausen
showed that beats and tones form a continuum, and the distinction between
them is an illusion. It is exclusively due to the lower threshold in our hearing,
whether we perceive sound as beats or tone.

A similar perception of the difference tone appears as a related phenomena

called binaural beats. These beats are an artifact of two tones at slightly
different frequencies (a difference smaller than 30 Hz). The two tones are
presented separately to each of the listeners ears using stereo headphones.
A remarkable detail is that the beats do not exist as acoustical phenomena in
this case. Instead, they result from brainwave encoding of the difference in
frequency of each tone.

Binaural Hearing

The phase differences between the two ears is one of the aspects that make
up our binaural hearing. Localization of sound originates in the fact that the
ears are some distance apart and, as such, the brain always registers slight
differences in phase, intensity and spectrum of the sound striking each ear.
There is definitely more happening with the sound than just panning
between the left and right ear. If you listen to Gwely Mernans, a song by
Aphex Twin, in a chamber with frontal stereo setup, the beats actually move
clearly in circles around you, left and right as well as in front and behind you,
without any speakers being placed there. The localization of a sound source
in front or behind the listener, as well as above and beneath the listener, is
not a matter of the left and right division of the ears, but due to complex
filtering of the sound as a result of angle reflections in the ear.
Even if the sound waves are projected from in front, the brain could render
the sound as coming from behind if the right filtering is applied. In practice,
this filtering is very complicated to achieve and remains a highly unstable
effect, because no pair of ears have the same shape. Everyone learns to
render the 3-dimensional localization of sound based on the individual shape
of their ears, thus no formula can achieve a definite effect for every listener.
Therefore the binaural illusion might not be apparent for everybody listening
to the track stated above, but the use of good-quality closed headphones
increases the chance of fully perceiving it.

Those bring back the initial question: Where does sound actually exist? In a
virtual code, as physical waves in space, in waves encoded by the brain, or
as an idea, a memory or fantasy? Each of the above examples requires a
different answer: it resides sometimes here, sometimes there, maybe

everywhere at once or nowhere at all. This question is not only an exotic

feature of the peculiar examples presented, but underlies the perception of
all sound and music we encounter.