52 – Answering questions 2 – That’s horrible!

Sometimes people don’t ask questions – they just exclaim. At a conference in Barcelona, I had just played one of my favourite sound files, one that I call ‘able-zoo’ which consists of a variety of voices, and a variety of versions of ‘be able to’. There was an immediate reaction from someone close to the stage: ‘That’s horrible’. Listen to it below – see if you agree.

This was one of a number of occasions when, on reflection, I was not happy with the response I gave. This response was to the effect that ‘What you call ‘horrible’ is normal for the Jungle’. My answer rode on the assumption that hearing the same words said in different circumstances, by different speakers, would be an enlightening – even delightful – experience which would hammer home the fact that sound shapes of all words and phrases can vary so much.

But actually, presenting examples of sound shapes in such a way is quite counter to our normal experience of speech. (Even though they may be samples of normality). Our normal experience of listening is that we have time to acclimatise to the accents, speech patterns, and individual characteristics of each speaker, and we work with streams of speech which are intended to make sense. Our hearing/listening mechanisms are therefore not accustomed to encounter a sequence of non-sense-making language samples containing ‘the same words’. So when thus confronted with isolated samples of sound shapes joined together in a bewildering chain of ‘same words/different sounds’ the reaction ‘That’s horrible’ seems quite reasonable.

So my short answer (short because I was anxious to progress through my workshop) ignored this dimension of the ‘That’s horrible!’ reaction.

I leap I dance I jump for joy, when I have compiled such chains of sound shapes, forgetting that for people listening to such chains for the first time this can be a shocking challenge. A good starting point for a workshop perhaps.