The Importance of Sound – Part One - The Hearing Consultancy

The Importance of Sound – Part One

As Hearing Aid Audiologists one of our primary concerns is helping our Clients to hear better with particular emphasis on speech understanding. The significance of speech in connecting us to other people is well documented and as the inspirational deaf and blind author Helen Keller noted, “Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people”

However, spoken words are not the only sounds that are important to us and our general wellbeing. In this series of articles we explore how sound has played a fundamental role in our lives’ and indeed our very existence!

The Joni Mitchell Woodstock song “We are stardust” might not be so far from the truth. In 2009 the European Space Agency launched the Planck space telescope to study and to “better understand the origin of the universe and the formation of galaxies”.

According to NASA, nearly 14 billion years ago our universe was just a ball of hot plasma (electrons, protons and light), it was the sound waves from the “big bang” that sculpted the structure of the cosmos.

After about 380,000 years following the “big bang” the sound waves that had freely travelled through this soup of hot matter were slowed down by the plasma beginning to cool enough to form atoms. The sound waves then caused the atoms to begin to vibrate and coalesce.

It was these wave fronts that were the spawning grounds for the galaxies in our universe and ultimately us.

If you would like to hear an audible translation of the sound waves that travelled through our early universe and were “heard” by the Planck space telescope, then follow this link to the NASA sound file.

However, if you would like to hear your family and friends better, then follow this link to our online booking system or call Freephone 1800 804322.

Look out for our next feature in the Importance of Sound. Sound wave Image from www.freeimages.co.uk

The Importance of Sound – Part One

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