Many written languages refer to spoken ones, but sounds can be hard to describe. The unique qualities of voices challenge verbal description, recognizable yet tough to characterize. In a writing workshop, novelist Janet Fitch asked students to find words for voices they knew well, leading to a rigorous creative workout (Fitch 2020). The elusiveness of some features of sound makes it a useful metaphor for intuitions difficult to convey.

The pitch and intensity of sound often bring words to mind, thanks to familiar synesthetic metaphors. A sound may be “high-” or “low-” pitched (describing hearing in terms of vision), or loud or “soft” (describing hearing in terms of touch). The unique, identifying features of sounds depend on their more elusive timbre, shaped by the harmonic “peaks” in their energy spectra (Kraus 19-21). How would you convey the difference between a cello and a flute playing middle C? How would you describe the difference between Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”?

Recent psychological studies indicate that sensitivity to sounds’ features starts early. In a collaborative study of Chinese and U.S. children, Weiyi Ma, William Forde Thompson, and their colleagues found that children as young as 3 responded emotionally to changes in environmental sounds (Ma et al. 1144). Studies of adults’ reactions to sounds suggest that people use the same sonic cues when responding emotionally to voices, music, or noises in their surroundings (Ma et al. 1144). Evidence also indicates that feeling “chills” when hearing music or other sounds isn’t idiosyncratic. Perceptions of "frisson" (a feeling of tickling or tingling) correlate with sounds’ acoustic features. Takuya Koumura and her colleagues have observed that “sounds with dark and compact timbre” are most likely to induce........

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