Human interaction is a basic need

To describe the world and allow others to understand the perspective that a single human has; mechanisms were created to communicate events, emotions and more between one another. While we have cave paintings and more to describe the history of visual communication nothing exists that I am aware of that captures the start of the aural communication. Over time though we know that stories were told, and noises were used to communicate between people.

Those noises might have been formed as vocalizations and a common understanding of what those noises represented to those close by became language. Even before language was formed, humans needed a way to communicate danger, as well as safety. They would undoubtedly have therefore used noises made by impact of one item on another, whether a stick hitting a rock or a hand hitting another body part to communicate the world experience that they were having to another human.

So foundational is sound to the human experience, that we take it for granted. It becomes intrinsic to our experience of day-to-day and the noise of the world around us is described by the dismissive term ‘background noise,’ the non-essential waves that would seek to distract from the thing that is most important to your current moment. In audio engineering, there have been a variety of terms created to describe this set of experiences. Noise floor, Signal to Noise ratio; terms that are so well understood that they have been co-opted into everyday life outside of audio engineering. For example, we describe the constant bombardment of news and the rumor mill by the same term – signal to noise.

The need to communicate clearly with other humans is critical to our day-to-day existence, and of our understanding of who we are as a species. It is in many ways what separates our species from others but most if not, all species use some element of sound to communicate with the world around them. The bark of a dog, the howl of the wolf, growl of a big cat to the purr of a domesticated cat; the expression of these sounds is understood by other members of those species and is interpreted and used by humans to understand how that creature is feeling. Humans use other factors to then determine and communicate the understanding to each other about the threat that might exist.

How far away is the wolf? We calculate risk, distance and so much else from the sound elements associated to that unmistakable sound. If the howl is loud and present, then it is very close-by and our hearing will trigger our brain into fight or flight, to be able to localize in which direction the main threat is coming from and turn our head to point our eyes in that direction. This is the foundation for what in audio engineering is binaural sound, the brains interpretation of where something is based on the time of arrival and signal to noise ratio in each of our individually configured ears.