Summary Table

In our modern lives we hear hits, slides, and rings all around us, and we also hear the sounds of speech. They mean fundamentally different things to us, and so our brains quickly learn to treat them differently. Our brains can treat them differently because, despite the many similarities between solid‑object physical event sounds and speech sounds that I have pointed to throughout this chapter, there are ample auditory cues distinguishing them (e.g., the timbre of a voice is fundamentally different from the timbre of most solid objects). And once our brains treat these sounds as fundamentally different in their ecological meaning, it can be next to impossible to hear that there are deep similarities in how they sound. A fish struggling up onto land for the first time, however, and listening to human speech intermingled with the solid‑object event sounds in the terrestrial environment, might find the similarity overwhelming. “What is wrong with these apes,” it might wonder, “that they spend so much of their day mimicking the sounds of solid‑object physical events?”

In this chapter, I have tried to bring out the fish in all of us, pointing out the solid‑object event sounds we make when we’re speaking, but fail to notice because of our overfamiliarity with them (and because of the similarities not holding “all the way up,” as discussed in the previous chapter). The table below summarizes the many ways in which speech sounds like solid‑object physical events, with references to the earlier sections where we discussed each of them.