The voice, speaking skills and auricular sense play the most important role in our communications with others. What would we do without them? Just think how our lives would be if we couldn’t speak or hear! It may seem near impossible for us to express our thoughts and ideas or to share our feelings, emotions and desires with others. Be that as it may, hearing-impaired persons are still able to communicate with the people around them and even to perceive their emotions. It may seem incredible but it’s a reality. Someone once told me about an experiment in which two people were trying to communicate. What was special about this interaction was that one of them, let’s call them Person A, had a hearing impairment. The pair – Person A and Person B – were in the same room, and while Person A was blindfolded, Person B read a funny story that was full of jokes, then afterwards read a sadly tragic story. Asked what they had felt, Person A was surprisingly accurate, having perceived something joyful followed by something sad (remember, Person A had been blindfolded so that they could not see Peron B’s expressions and be influenced by them).
An attempt to redo the experiment with audio recordings proved unsuccessful. This time, Person A was unable to form an opinion on the emotional charge of the recordings.
Although the results of the first experiment had been surprising, we could have expected the second to be just as successful. But at the end of the day, Person A couldn’t perceive anything. Based on this experiment, my friend hypothesized that the human voice produced not only sound waves but also a different type of wave that may facilitate the transmission of the speaker’s feelings. This different wave type is perceived by the hearing-impaired when they are spoken to but cannot be recorded with electronic devices, hence why they cannot be perceived via audio recordings. Should this hypothesis be validated by further experiments, it might just explain why a play is different from the televised version for the audience. Spectators at the theater have more intense emotions than they would have if watching a video recording of the performance. This assumption might also explain why the power of influence of the human voice is greater in face-to-face communication than in conversations over the phone or why lectures delivered in university halls are more interesting for students than the online versions.
What do you think about all this? Does the difference lie in the voice or the auricular interference? Please comment, sharing your arguments and/or your own experiments!
Memo
