Monday, September 28, 2009

What Do Urban Sounds Do to Your Brain?

We live in a sonic world, immersed in vibrations that stimulate microscopic hair cells deep inside our ears. This unseen energy influences our mood, our learning, even our health. We experience it as comforting music, as information-laden speech, or—all too often—as irritating noise, a by-product of our increasingly mechanized world. Despite all the ways sound affects us, we often let it slip unnoticed into the background of our lives. Hoping to understand it better, I set out to explore the mysteries of sound in the course of one day.


Dragging the reader in with an interesting fact automatically gives the journalist a handful of points. Not just any old fact: It was a fact that incorporated every reader. Our ears are something we don't really know about. This pulled me in and as I continued to read on I was intrigued and wanted to know what she had to say. She listed how it influences us daily -- the possible ways people perceive noise. There was no generalization of the subject. The journalist has a voice and personality in her writing, making the lede much more conversational. There weren't any intellectual words, so it wasn't intimidating. But it is also very misleading since the rest of the article consisted of words that the average person wouldn't understand. The last sentence had an adventurous tone to it and lead me to the narrative article. "I set out to explore the mysteries of sound in the course of one day," made me feel as if both of us were on this road of exploration. I couldn't wait to find out what she had discovered.

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