Good Vibrations: Touch, Sound and Movement

Abstract

Some years earlier the relationship between touch and sound was made very clear to me when I took my four-year old son to see George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace (1999). When the movie started and the John Williams’ score trumpeted forth, he screamed and put his hands over his ears. Then he picked up my hands and put them over his hands and we watched the whole movie with him sitting on my lap and my hands over his hands over his ears. In The Soundscape (1994, 1977), Murray Schafer wrote about this tactility of sound: ‘Hearing and touch meet where the lower frequencies of available sound pass over to tactile vibrations (at about 20 hertz). Hearing is a way of touching at a distance …’ (1994, p. 11). Later in the book, he noted that human beings ‘hear from zero decibels to approximately 130 decibels (where sound sensation is converted to pain) (p. 115). My son’s pain threshold was lower, probably because of his age and delicate eardrums, but for him the sound of the film was a painful touching.