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Table 1. List of Listening Positions from the Acoustic Communication framework (Truax, 2001)
Listening Positions
Description
Active attentional and purposeful listening, a questing out towards a sound source or soundscape. Sometimes
listening-in-search involves a determined seeking of a particular sound template in an aurally busy environment.
The
cocktail party effect,
for example, is a special mode of listening-in-search, which involves a zooming in
on a particular sound source—often semantic-based (speech) and familiar in an environment of competing
sound information in the same spectrum (Truax, 2001, p. 22).
Listening-in-search
Listening-in-readiness involves background listening with an underlying expectation for a particular sound or
set of sound signals (such as a baby's cry). It is a sub-attentional listening in expectation of a familiar sound
or signal, a latent alertness.
Listening-in-readiness
A non-attentional listening, a receptive stance without a conscious attention or interpretation of sounds or
soundscape heard.
Background Listening
An adaptation of media's
flow
of perceptual and attentional cues as delivered through sound. Media listen-
ing and distracted listening are two positions of listening that Truax (2001) argues are a direct result of the
transition to electroacoustic sound and especially the way in which sound has evolved in its use in media.
Since much of media is experienced as a background to life, often in the visual background, programming
flow has developed sophisticated and strong aural cues in order to manage and direct listeners' attention to
the next item on the media program.
Media Listening
Analytical Listening
A focused, critical expert listening to particular qualities of electroacoustic sounds and recordings.
taking the viewer into a powerful suspension of
disbelief, to complete virtual reality, ambient in-
telligent environments, and computer-augmented
physical spaces which have become the norm for
contemporary museums and art galleries. There
is also the ever-so-popular genre of
reality TV
,
which has reared and acculturated a version of
society of the spectacle
generation of audiences.
the move from abstract musical
chiptunes
(8-bit
synthetic tunes) to realistic sampled sounds in the
design of game soundscapes. Fidelity here will
exemplify the technological changes in game
sound's
realism
.
role in Game sound:
socio-cultural History
In tracing some of the history of game sound,
Stephen Deutch (2003) makes a convincing point
about the trajectories that sound for games has
taken historically. As he points out, the first game
sound designers were essentially musicians and/or
experimental composers (p. 31). In that, histori-
cally there was a split between those who followed
Pierre Schaffeur's
musique concrète
tradition and
those who were interested in electronic music. The
second group ended up getting involved in game
sound production and laying the foundations of
contemporary game sound. The way in which
this fact concerns fidelity is that while
musique
concrète
works with sampled sound—that is,
real
acoustic sources—as material for sonic expres-
sions, electronic musicians were fascinated with
the purely abstract world of the synthesizer and
FIDELItY
Literally, fidelity means
faithfulness
. In relation
to sound, fidelity signifies the accuracy and qual-
ity of sound reproduction, that is, the degree to
which an electroacoustic iteration faithfully rep-
resents the original acoustic source. From there,
the notions of hi-fi (high fidelity) and lo-fi have
emerged and are now commonly applied to refer
to quality of audio equipment, specific recordings
and (cinematic) listening experiences. As noted in
the previous section, Schafer (1977) also utilized
these two distinctions of fidelity, except he applied
them to refer to a soundscape's ecological balance
in terms of a signal-to-noise ratio. In this section,
we'll focus on fidelity as a concept representing
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