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A N T I C I P A T I O N
Someone waiting for a sound to appear will “pre-hear” – that is, to actually hear the expected signal, even if no sound has been emitted. This effect can be observed either in the expectation of an unknown sound, every rustling then becoming a potential sign, or in familiar situations where the listener anticipates a foreseeable (or hearable) sonic context. If anamnesis is most often an involuntary phenomenon, anticipation, on the other hand, may appear when one expects too much. We may dread a sound, or we may be eager to hear it, but either way, that sound seems to be heard
without being actually emitted. The anticipation effect is often caused by a specific expectation regarding the sound that is about to appear. It happens as if the desire of the event was creating its own sound envelope. When a child is barely asleep, for instance, the parents listening for crying may have the impression of constantly hearing it. This effect can also be illustrated by the expectation of a car or train passing: every little murmur or noise is interpreted as a precursor to the expected sound. In war, the threat of bombing can also create strong anticipation effects.
A N A M N E S I S
An effect of reminiscence in which a past situation or atmosphere is brought back to the listener’s consciousness, provoked by a particular signal or sonic context. Anamnesis, a semiotic effect, is the often involuntary revival of memory caused by listening and the evocative power of sounds. Anamnesis, an evocation of the past, refers to situations in which a sound or a sonic context revives a situation or an atmosphere of the
past. This effect can span very different periods of time while
retaining its intrinsic nature: it can happen on the scale of an
entire life, a song that evokes a childhood memory, or a short
span of time – for example, when a film soundtrack plays on
the exposition of a sound element previously heard. However,
the more distant and unexpected the reference, the more the
emotion may overwhelm the listener. The effect is not based on
the sound or on its meaning. It is rather the listener who gives
it an anamnesic value. Two people listening to the same sound
environment can develop very different evocations, but these
effects could not happen without the occurrence of sound. The
anamnesis effect merges sound, perception, and memory. It
plays with time, reconnecting past mental images to present
consciousness, with no will other than the free activity of association. In its clinical meaning, anamnesis does not refer only to a simple evocation of a memory; it also implies the histori-
cal reconstitution of a disease by a patient. In the same way, a
sound or a group of sounds may lead to the reconstitution of a
whole period of life as it unfolds during the entire updating of
a time sequence.
A S Y N D E T O N
The removal from the perception or memory of one or many
sound elements in an audible whole. Surveys studying everyday sound behaviour show that the amount of “forgotten” or unheard sound is extremely prominent. The asyndeton effect allows the valorization of a portion of the sound environment
through the evacuation of useless elements from our consciousness. Asyndeton, through its rhetorical origin, refers more to the generic notion of forgetting, whereas erasure is used specifically in reference to practice.
A T T R A C T I O N
A phonotropic effect in which an emerging sound phenomenon
attracts and polarizes attention, being conscious or not. The magnitude of this effect can range from fleeting comprehension to the complete mobilization of attention. In very busy streets, for instance, singers and musical groups try constantly to gain the attention of passersby. These sound situations exert a power of attraction precisely because they are in contrast
with the ambient hubbub. When the acoustic horizons of different musicians overlap, there is no emergence effect, thus
no attraction. A siren, which manifests itself exclusively in the
sonic sphere and whose source often cannot be located, illustrates the attraction/repulsion duality that characterizes the emergence of certain sound events.
B L U R R I N G
The blurring (estompage) effect refers to the progressive and imperceptible disappearance of a sound atmosphere. In contrast to the decrescendo effect, the auditor usually only notices the absence of sound once the effect is completed.
C H A I N
A chain reaction: one sound event provokes a sonic response,
which produces another, and so on. These successive inductions, whether or not they are enacted consciously, can result in a phenomenon of sound escalation. Crowd situations are
favourable to the appearance of this effect; the applause that follows a show, for instance, may be started by a small group of people, or even a single auditor, and progressively lead the whole audience up to a manifestation whose intensity greatly exceeds the sum of individual contributions. Sometimes the role of a “claque” appears to be quite useful in inciting movement and maintaining pressure.
C H O R U S
An electroacoustic effect that consists of mixing a direct signal with a portion of itself, slightly delayed and modulated through a low-frequency oscillator. The variable phase displacement thus produced enriches the original sound by seeming to multiply the sound sources – hence its reference to chorus, the sum of individual voices.
C O C K T A I L
This effect, named by E. Cherry with reference to the sound space in which we can observe it best, refers to our ability to focus attention on the speech of a specific speaker by disregarding irrelevant information coming from the surroundings.
In this type of metabolic context, sound components are almost equivalent in intensity and frequency: it is their multiplication that creates the surrounding sound level. From the
physical point of view, one of the predominant elements in the
cocktail effect is the spatial separation of noise and speech. In
consequence, we know that, on the psycho-physiological level, selective listening is governed by our capacity to discriminate
sounds from different sources – that is, by our capacity to localize in the noise.
C O L O U R I N G
An effect describing the influence of a location, electroacoustic system, or instrument on the new balance of the frequencies of a sound, “coloured” through its diffusion. We speak of
the “colour” of a room or the “colour” of a loudspeaker. Colouring is acoustically linked to filtration, but its use remains
more popular. To the untrained ear, the colouring of a sound
situation is particularly well perceived when colouration changes rapidly. A good example is the clear inside/outside transition of film soundtracks or the entry of woodwind instruments (flute, clarinet, bassoon, oboe) in the musical stream of string
instruments.
C O U P L I N G
Interaction between two sound phenomena that seem to be distinct yet connected, without being necessarily engaged in
a causal relationship. In architecture, for example, we can observe the reciprocal influences of different reverberations of
two adjacent spaces.