Sound for Fantasy and Freedom - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 24

According to this concept, observers are not
separately sensitive to structures in the optic and
acoustic flows, but are rather sensitive to patterns
that extend across these flows: the global array.
Another way to describe this is that we do not
“see and hear” but rather “see-hear”, what we
perceive is the sum of sensations reaching our
different modalities.
What we really hear, what a sound is, where
a sound is located and so forth are questions that
philosophers have been arguing over for several
hundreds of years. O'Callaghan (2009) gives a
broad summary of the history and current state
of the field. What most philosophers and sound
researchers agree on is that sounds are the result
of events in the physical world. Sound holds
information about these events and the objects
involved in them. This means that to our percep-
tion, sounds are strongly linked to the physical
world and we are “hard wired” to treat sounds as
tokens of physical activity, matter in motion and
matter in interaction.
In this context the pioneering work of William
Gaver (1993) on sound classification and listening
modes is still often cited and relevant for game
sound design. Gaver makes a distinction between
musical listening and everyday listening. In musi-
cal listening, you listen to the acoustic properties
of the sound, for example, its pitch, loudness, and
timbre. In everyday listening, on the other hand,
you listen to events rather than sounds. When you
hear a car passing by or you hear a bottle breaking
you do not pay much attention to pitch or loud-
ness but more to the event as such. In everyday
listening, the interpretation and the mapping of
sounds to the individual's previous experiences
and memories are crucial. When a bottle crashes
against the floor, loses its original shape and turns
into a number of smaller and larger pieces, this
is immediately obvious to the eye. But, in order
to be able to pinpoint the event that caused the
sound of the broken bottle, the ear has to learn and
form a memory that connects the sound of broken
glass to the event of a bottle crashing and losing

its shape. Even if the individual has a previous
experience and memory that connects the sound
of broken glass to the event of a broken bottle,
the ear, not knowing the exact cause of the sound,
might hesitate. Was it a bottle that crashed or was
it perhaps a large drinking glass that broke? The
eye can give the correct answer, whereas the ear
is left to interpret and to guess in various degrees.
Tuuri, Mustonen, and Pirhonen (2007) have
continued along this path and propose a hierarchi-
cal scheme of listening modes. Two of these are
preconscious, two are source-oriented, three are
context-oriented and one is quality-oriented. In
the two preconscious-oriented listening modes, the
focus is on what reflexive, emotive and associative
responses a sound evokes in the listener. In the
two source-oriented modes, the focus is on how
the listener perceives the source of a sound and
what event caused it. In the three context-oriented
modes, the focus is on whether the sound had a
specific purpose, if it represents any symbolic or
conventional meaning, and if the sound in that case
was suitable and understandable in the context.
In the last, quality-oriented listening mode, the
focus is on the acoustic properties of the sound,
its pitch, loudness, duration and so forth. To use
these or other, complementary, identified listen-
ing modes is a powerful way to inform the sound
design process of not only computer games, but
sound design processes in general. The important
thing to notice here is that research on listening
modes in general shows that sound can indeed
be used to evoke emotions and associations, to
communicate properties of physical objects and
events and to convey meaning and purpose.
Already from the time before we are born our
auditory perception starts giving us information
about the world around us (Lecanuet, 1996). From
day one we start building our library of associations
to individual sounds and to whole soundscapes.
Gradually, we learn what they mean and we train
our ability to interpret them. Furthermore, some
researchers argue that we experience sounds “as
of” a bigger whole. O'Callaghan (2009) argues