Question: How does sound help you find out things about the people and the society they live in?

Damien Hall answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hi lidlvampire –

Good to see you at the chat earlier today. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Sound itself is only a way to find out about society and people. What I do is, I do interviews and record them, then analyse the recordings with a special software which allows me to get the statistics about the sound-waves that make up what people say. (Have you done things about sound-waves in Physics?) Then I can use numbers to be scientific and precise about people’s accents, and to say exactly how different two accents are from one another.

One example of how this has helped find out about people and society is in the work I did on the English-Scottish border. We already know (you will know too if you have been to Scotland or talked to Scots!) that the English and Scottish accents are very different. But we found that they became even more different when the people talking didn’t like each other – like, if it was an English person talking and they didn’t like Scots, or a Scot talking and they didn’t like English people. So that’s one way in which the numbers that come from analysing a sound-wave have helped to confirm something about people and society – we now know that it’s true that people make their accents more different from each other if they don’t like the other one or the other one’s country!

If you want to read more about that project on the English-Scottish border, you can look here:

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb

Have you noticed that people make their accents more similar to each other if they like each other, or more different if they don’t? Another example is that groups who have a certain slang use it more when there are people around who they don’t want to understand them.