ABSTRACT
From the piercing wail of an ambulance to the soothing melody of a Mozart sonata, it is clear that sound carries enormous meaning in daily life. Sound can be a reinforcing stimulus used to guide exible behavior-as such, its meaning is often dependent on contextual cues. For example, the ringing of a bell at different times in one’s career may mean you are late for class or that your speaker time at a conference is over. Also, what we believe to be the inherent pleasing or aversive properties of sound are often counterintuitive. For example, psychophysical work suggests that it is the low-frequency spectral components that lead to the “chilling” effect of ngernails scratching on a blackboard, not the high frequencies that most people associate with the unpleasant nature of that sound (Halpern et al. 1986).
