Auditory Envelopment: An Undervalued Percept

Auditory envelopment (AE) has an emotional and stimulating effect, possibly akin to a recently discovered percept, affective touch, modulated by non-neural pathways of the body. Four listening tests are presented where children from the age of 6, to the eldest at 96, reliably identified abstract low frequency sounds, with AE inducement being the only difference between them. Moreover, naive test subjects across the ages used remarkably similar words when asked to describe their impression, thereby implying the percept to be fundamental. AE is also found to be primarily an aural percept with a lower frequency limit between 35 and 50 Hz. AE may be naturally experienced in acoustic music, concert halls and houses of worship, but movie theatres with decent acoustics and 3D audio systems offer a systemic and extraordinary capacity to administer AE in reproduction. Practical implications are discussed, including AE-control bottlenecks in the recording, mixing, distribution and reproduction of audio.

Published

2024-10-21

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

auditory envelopment, emotional sound, affective touch hypothesis, universal percept, auditory envelopment is stimulating to young and old people alike, hearing is the earliest and most formative sense, vision and other senses build on hearing, movie theatres are reliable places to enjoy auditory envelopment, music production for social listening in movie theatres

DOI

10.5594/MOO/3014

ISBN

978-1-61482-965-2