Sound design is different from finding or composing music for a film. It is the creation of a sound environment, including ambient noises, and the acoustic properties of settings for dialogues or action.
The study of audiology and acoustics, which informs Murch’s work, originates with psychologists, engineers, musicians, physicists, and philosophers. Biologists and physicians — otologists and neurologists — study both the physical and mental process of sound perception. Murch explains how deeply sound is embedded in the mind, starting four-and-a-half months before birth:
We are conceived. We develop in the womb, and four and a half months after conception, the hearing switch is turned on.
The sounds which are heard prior to birth make a distinct impression on the mind. Immediately upon birth, a baby can recognize its mother’s voice, and when held by the mother, the baby responds to the sound of her heartbeat.
But music is also distinctly heard prior to birth, which gives rise to a series of questions about the formation of musical taste. Is a child born with preferences for certain types of music based on in utero experiences?
Murch notes that, of the five senses, hearing most decisively shapes prenatal experiences:
Sight is not turned on. We live in darkness in the womb. Smell is not operative in the womb. Touch is a kind of a slippery mucal feeling, but hearing is as fully articulated at four and a half months as it will be later. So, the child developing in the womb is a fully auditory creature. And so, each of us in this room was born into consciousness. The developing fetus is a conscious being, developing a sense of the self and the world, such as it is in the womb. All through the process of hearing.
Philosophers have long debated the question of innate ideas: Are there ideas already present in the human mind when a person is born? To analyze this question, the distinction between birth and conception must be examined.
In any case, at birth, one would say that a child must have some ideas — auditory ideas, the memory of auditory experience. Which might lead to a question about what philosophers — like Descartes and Locke — meant when they wrote about “innate” ideas. Did they perhaps mean ideas present at conception?
At birth, the child begins to connect its auditory ideas with sense-data arriving via sight, smell, taste, and touch. In this way, hearing may have a special place of privilege among the five senses. Hearing may be the foundational sense.
Walter Murch continues:
When you’re born, these other senses kick on. Primarily sight and you start to begin to develop this idea that the sound is caused by something. Your mother comes in, and you start to see these strange things called lips beginning to move, and the voice that you have heard in the womb comes out of these lips. And you begin to say, Oh, that’s what made the voice.
Murch’s remarks suggest both a possible argument for innate ideas and a possible reframing of the debate about “innate ideas” as “ideas present at conception” or as “prenatal ideas” — innate ideas cease to be controversial if the natal moment is preceded by months of sense-data and sensory experiences being processed into sensory memories.
His remarks also offer the possibility that musical taste is shaped by prenatal experiences.
