"Many written languages refer to spoken ones, but sounds can be hard to describe. The unique qualities of voices challenge verbal description, recognizable yet tough to characterize. In a writing workshop, novelist Janet Fitch asked students to find words for voices they knew well, leading to a rigorous creative workout (Fitch 2020). The elusiveness of some features of sound makes it a useful metaphor for intuitions difficult to convey."
"The pitch and intensity of sound often bring words to mind, thanks to familiar synesthetic metaphors. A sound may be "high-" or "low-" pitched (describing hearing in terms of vision), or loud or "soft" (describing hearing in terms of touch). The unique, identifying features of sounds depend on their more elusive timbre, shaped by the harmonic "peaks" in their energy spectra (Kraus 19-21)."
People experience emotional responses to sounds in their environments, with pitch and intensity often mapped onto vision and touch through synesthetic metaphors. Timbre, determined by harmonic peaks in a sound’s energy spectrum, provides unique identifying qualities that resist easy verbal description. Exercises to name familiar voices reveal difficulty capturing timbre in words. Sensitivity to sound features appears early: children as young as three react emotionally to environmental sound changes. Adults use similar sonic cues for emotional responses to voices, music, and noises, and experiences of frisson or chills during sound exposure are commonly shared rather than purely idiosyncratic.
Read at Psychology Today
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