Question: Why are you most interested in the science of sound

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 22 Mar 2010:

hey stanley

it’s hard to explain quite why i like sounds so much, other than because they’ve always interested and entertained me. i began taking music lessons when i was 5 and ended up meeting most of my closest friends through some sort of music-making, so that’s always meant a lot to me. in a similar way, i loved learning different languages at school, so that’s how i ended up finding a research interest in speech. it’s hard to say whether i got interested in these things because i have a brain that likes sound, or because of my childhood experiences. it’s probably a combination. anyway, when i was at university, i did a course where we found out about all sorts of phenomena in hearing – things like how we hear pitch and loudness, how we process speech and how we can locate sounds in space. i immediately loved that course, much more than similar lectures on light and vision.

what topics in science do you most enjoy?