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TimewARP • User Guide
English
3.3
Attributes of Auditory Events
Of all the thousands of sounds you hear in a single day, only some have a definite beginning or ending point.
Many just come and go without a clear start/stop. Those that do have a reasonably clear start/stop we will call
auditory events. The other sounds, the less clearly defined ones, we can call auditory textures or backgrounds or
even structures.
Think how some sounds are more complicated than others. The hum of a refrigerator is sort of simple, the hum of
a tuning fork is (as we heard above) really simple. A single bass note from a piano is quite complicated, the way it
keeps changing and evolving as it dies away. Human speech is a very complicated kind of sound, even when it’s
your native tongue (when it’s a language you don’t understand, it sounds even more complicated).
There are many, many more kinds of sounds to hear than you or I have words to describe them with. Here are just
a couple of the most general distinctions people make about different kinds of sounds: