Ever wondered why you sound so good singing in the shower? Or if your pet loves music as much as you do?
Scientist and music lover, Upulie Divisekera, explained the scientific reasons behind these and other musical questions in an interview with Classic Drive's Vanessa Hughes.
Why does it sound so good when I sing in the shower?
According to Divisekera, our showers often consist of a lot of hard and smooth surfaces, so they don’t absorb sound. They reflect it back to you, instead. These surfaces, however, aren’t perfectly flat and so there’s some interference with the sound. This coupled with the interference of the steam and the reverberation of the space makes the sound much more pleasant to listen to.
Even if your pitch isn’t perfect, it may sound better in the shower as the sound is imperfectly reflected back to you.
“If you’re trying to learn how to sing, or you’re practicing your singing and you don’t have access to a recording studio, then singing in the shower is a really fantastic way of improving your singing and hearing your voice properly,” Divisekera said.
How do our brains interpret invisible waves of sound into music?
“It's a really amazing process the way that we hear and interpret sound waves. So sound is just a normal part of the world that we live in, and sound is actually airwaves. It’s variations in air pressure that happen at kind of regular intervals and so they become a wave.”
Divisekera explained that physical sound waves travel on an impressive journey to become sound in the brain. Sound waves are funnelled by our ears, helped along by tiny little hairs that help guide them to your ear drum. This vibration is then sent along to three little bones in your inner ear, and then onto the cochlear, a snail-shaped fluid membrane. Here, the physical vibrations are converted into electrical signals in the brain, where the brain interprets and reconstructs these signals into sound.
What makes something in tune or out of tune?
Pitch is related to the frequency of a sound wave. The higher the frequency, the more high-pitched it sounds. Over the course of hundreds of years, we’ve developed a culture in which certain scales, and intervals between notes are ‘correct’ and pleasing to the ear, and some aren’t.
Divisekera explained further: “When something is out of tune it's because we've been trained, to some extent, to hear particular pitches or particular frequencies as correct and pleasant and pleasing. So, when they not correct, when they’re slightly off kilter, not quite the right frequency, sound and timbre and all those qualities then it sounds out of tune to us.”
Why do some people interpret sound as colours as well as sound?
According to Divisekera, we’re not actually sure how it is that certain people encounter one sensory stimulus that stimulates other sensory pathways in the brain. Someone may hear a sound and associate a colour with it or see a colour and associate a sound with it. These associations aren’t just in your head, they’re projected outside so that people who experience sound this way, known as synesthetes, see colour as they listen to music.
It’s not something you can learn to do. You’re either born a synesthete or you aren’t, but some people have tried to implant things into the brain to get around this.
“We're kind of used to just hearing or interpreting one sense at a time as it were, so you know where we might listen to music and that's all that we hear, and it evokes emotions. But for synesthetes they have stimulus that creates a much bigger broader picture, an image, a sensory experience and therefore emotional experience as well,” explained Divisekera.
Do animals hear music the same way that we do?
Divisekera explained that scientists aren’t sure if animals can hear music the same way that we do, but our pets can definitely hear it, and it can evoke responses in cats and dogs. Studies show that cats generally don’t like music very much, especially as they get older, but dogs do.
In some studies, Divisekera said “…it turned out that when listening to metal, dogs became a little bit more restless and a bit more nervous and anxious, but when they listened to classical they were way more relaxed. So, dogs apparently really like classical music.”
Upulie Divisekera is an Australian molecular biologist, science communicator and writer. You can find her on twitter at @upulie.