The sound of si-ence
In the days before broadband was commonplace, interrupted video streaming, with breaks in sound and vision, was a regular annoyance. If only it could be more lifelike. Well it turns out that life is not like that at all. It seems that the brain is constantly filling in gaps and correcting inaccuracies for us - you’re probably all familiar with the famous spelling research from Cambridge University.
It appears too that the ears (and the brain’s processing of their input) are also constantly helping us out. This was demonstrated in an experiment published last year by Makio Kashino of NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan. He made a recording of the sentence “Do you understand what I’m trying to say.” He then cut tiny slices out of the recording and the resultant silences rendered it unintelligible. The next step was to replace these silences with “white noise” and people were once again able to make out what was being said. Miraculously, the sense of it was not even lost when it was cut up into 50-millisecond slices – and each one reversed. You can hear the audio samples here (note - they take several seconds to load).
So, what is it about silence that is so off putting? As a musician, my feeling is that it’s about “flow.” If the flow is uninterrupted, listeners will get through to the end somehow – regardless of wrong notes. However, silences (or spaces) grab the attention of the listener impeding their sense of flow – in fact, that’s what they’re for. They’re often used at the end of a phrase, section or piece to break up the flow and forewarn the listener of the end so that, when it happens, it brings with it a feeling of inevitability. This sort of thing seems to be grasped effortlessly by pupils in their first lesson.
Have a listen to the following three very short files of the same well-known phrase of music and see which you find more off-putting.
I agree with your observations about hesitations being much more disruptive to understanding of a musical phrase than wrong notes. On my computer, your phrase with spaces isn’t the best example of this though as it sounds like the same phrase played with accurate timing, but staccato. You might need to put in a sample with rests of varying lengths I think to illustrate your point more clearly.
Comment by Dorothy — September 28, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
Hi Dorothy,
Thanks for your comment and suggestion. The reason the spaces are of regular length is that I was I wasn’t trying to convey hesitancy or rhythmic inaccuracy - rather that spaces grab the attention even in the presence of accurate playing and an uninterrupted beat - or, to put it more simply, putting them in on purpose rather than by accident.
Comment by Alan Coady — September 29, 2007 @ 11:30 am