Under The Influence of Sound

An Introduction To Psychoacoustics

Abhishek Kothari
6 min readJan 28, 2019

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David Werbrouck on Unsplash.com

I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something — Hans Zimmer

There is an old aphorism that says god is in the details. If you are one of those audiophiles who chooses a car based on the audio system inside, you know what I am talking about. Perhaps, you are the kind whose world is a whirlwind of choices to appease your earbuds or you are a music gourmand who believes that the purest form of a love affair is the one between music and your ears. This article talks about the science behind that love affair called psychoacoustics.

In 1860, Gustav Fechner in his book ‘Elements Of Psychophysics’ coined the term ‘psychophysical’. The term Psychoacoustics means the study of the psychophysical affects of acoustics. The word acoustics means relating to sound or hearing. A sound is nothing but a propagation of air waves by whatever made the sound. The human ear is an incredibly complex and beautiful analog to digital sound converter.

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Abhishek Kothari

Futurist@The Intersection of Finance, Tech & Humanity. Stories of a Global Language: “Money”. Contributor @ Startup Grind, HackerNoon, HBR