Listening to Your Environment and the 3 Building Blocks of Sound

I’d like to touch on the importance of the artist’s experience of the surrounding world and how that experience informs their work.  In short:  Regardless of whether you compose pop music or generative ambient, having a grasp on how the world creates sound is useful knowledge when it comes to creating your own sounds.

So what system should one use for developing the skill of critically listening to one’s environment?  In my view, any sound can be helpfully broken up into 3 separate pieces:  pitch, timbre, and envelope.  There are other ways to look at it, but this is how I view sound on a conceptual level when I’m trying to reverse-engineer it for my own experiments.

1) Pitch represents the perceived note at which the sound is playing.  Some sounds are “tonal,” and some are more “atonal.”  Tonal means that there is a strongly identifiable fundamental frequency in the sound, and atonal means that the frequency content of the sound is more scattered and thus its fundamental frequency is harder to identify.  An example of a tonal sound would be the resonant frequency of a car interior while it’s driving down the road. 

Next time you’re driving, try humming the note that your car is generating and then try harmonizing with it.  I’m not much of a singer, so I tend to do this when I’m alone in the car. 

Drums and percussion are the most obvious examples of atonal sounds, although some drums sustain for a long enough time that they become quite tonal over their playback.  In your surrounding environment, good examples of atonality might also include the rustling of leaves or metal scraping on concrete.

2) Timbre is the frequency content of a sound other than its perceived pitch.  In my video tutorials, I often like to use the example of a horn and a piano playing the same note.  If you listened to one playing right after the other with a blindfold on, you could still distinguish the two instruments and this is because of timbre.  Timbre is often identified with descriptive terms such as “metallic,” “dull,” or “wooden,” to name just a few helpful adjectives.

3) Envelope is the last ingredient, referring to the temporal characteristics of the sound.  Does it fade in gradually or come in at full blast right away?  Does it sustain at the same volume as the initial attack, or does it drop off in level?  Does it fade out gradually or come screeching to a halt?  Envelope is vitally important to distinguishing between sounds, and along with timbre helps us to identify the source of the sound.

And there you have it, a basic rundown of a simple and effective system for categorizing sound in your mind.  Although it is by no means comprehensive, it will get you well on the way.  Many sound designers and music enthusiasts will likely already employ this system (or one like it) in their daily listening.  If you’re not one of them, try challenging yourself to truly experience your aural environment in this way.  You’ll find that this habit pays in dividends once it’s time to sit down and make some noises of your own.