ABSTRACT
All auditoria rely on both visual and acoustic stimulation. Tennyson is referring above to the acoustic response in a mountainous landscape, in which echoes add to the visual imagery and create a sense of space. At the scale of concert halls and theatres, acoustic reflections are no less significant in creating a sense of space, but the ear does not perceive as discrete events or echoes the thousands of reflections it receives. It blends them into a total experience. Only certain aspects of the sound are used to establish the size and character of the enclosed space. The ear also establishes the direction of the sound source and extracts the information content where possible. A world in which the ear was unable to combine sound reflections was described by the Rev. Brewer (1854):
If the ear ... were capable of appreciating every impulse, the confusion of sounds would be truly terrific. ... Every sound in our houses, every word in our churches, would be repeated ten thousand times. We should hear the direct sound of one syllable mingled with the reflections of another, and both recurring so frequently, that language would be a Babel of ‘confusion worse confounded’. The voice of affection and of love, so tranquil, so soothing, and so gentle, would be a clatter more painful than the gibbering of a stammerer.
