A few years ago I was leading a soundwalk through a park, the kind of walk where we stop every so often and just stand still and listen. One participant, who had grown up in rural Finland before moving to the States, said something that stuck with me. She said the silence in the group made her feel at home, and the fact that everyone kept apologizing for it made her feel like a stranger.
That one sentence has stayed in my head ever since, because it points at something most of us never stop to question: we assume sound works the same way everywhere. Loud is loud. Quiet is quiet. A pleasant sound is pleasant to everyone. None of that is true.
The short answer to the question in the headline is this: cultures do not just hear sound differently, they build entire systems of knowledge, memory, spirituality, and social order around it. What counts as music, what counts as noise, what counts as respectful silence, and what counts as an insult, all of it is learned. Sound is never neutral. It is shaped by the ears we were raised with.
That matters for anyone who cares about sonic wellness, because a soundscape that restores one community might unsettle another, and a “quiet” park in one cultural context can feel cold and unwelcoming in another. Understanding how different cultures value sound is not a side note to this work. It is the foundation of it.
Key Takeaways
- Sound perception is not universal. Culture shapes which sounds we notice, ignore, treasure, or fear.
- The Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea built a whole system of place-based knowledge, called acoustemology, around listening to their rainforest.
- Aboriginal Australian songlines encode navigation, law, and history in song, turning sound into a form of cartography.
- A West African talking drum can reproduce the tones of the Yorùbá language closely enough to be understood as speech.
- Some research suggests Japanese speakers process insect and nature sounds in the brain’s language centers, while many Western listeners process the same sounds as background noise. The finding is genuinely debated, and that debate is part of the story.
- Designing soundscapes that serve real communities means designing with cultural difference in mind, not around it.
Why We Keep Assuming Sound Is Universal
Most of the language we use to talk about sound was built inside one narrow cultural frame. Decibel charts, noise ordinances, “acceptable” ambient levels for offices and parks: these all come out of a Western, industrial, largely urban way of thinking about sound as a problem to be measured and managed.
That framework is not wrong exactly. It is incomplete. It treats sound almost entirely as a physical phenomenon, something with a frequency and an amplitude, and it quietly leaves out the fact that human beings have never related to sound as pure physics. We relate to it as meaning.
I have felt this gap firsthand doing this work across different neighborhoods and different groups. A soundscape that a group of retirees describes as “peaceful,” a nearby group of teenagers might describe as “dead.” A public plaza that planners praised for its low noise readings turned out, in conversations with nearby residents, to feel unsafe precisely because it was too quiet, stripped of the human chatter that told people the space was alive and watched over. The numbers said one thing. The lived experience said another.
This is the problem with treating sound as universal: it lets us design and legislate for an imaginary listener who does not actually exist. Real listeners carry culture in their ears.
What the Research Actually Shows
Once you start looking, the evidence for cultural difference in sound perception is not subtle. It shows up in anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, and music research, and it points in the same direction from several angles.
Start with the Kaluli people of the Bosavi rainforest region in Papua New Guinea. In the late 1970s, anthropologist Steven Feld spent extended time living among the Kaluli and documented something remarkable. Because dense vegetation limited what could be seen, sounds were relied upon as primary indicators of presence, and the rainforest was sonically rich, with insects, birds, wildlife, and running water combining to create a particular density of sound that shifted with the time of day and season. Feld coined the term acoustemology, acoustic epistemology, to describe sound as a way of knowing the world, not just hearing it. For the Kaluli, listening was not passive. It was how you understood where you were, what season it was, and what was happening around you.
Aboriginal Australian songlines take this even further. These are the paths said to have been followed by a creator spirit or ancestor across the land, functioning as oral maps in cultures with strong traditions of memorized knowledge rather than written records. Researchers studying Wardaman and other Aboriginal traditions have found that songlines carry practical navigational information alongside law, history, and ceremony, and that the practices connect people, place, and understanding in a living map rather than a static record. Sound, in this context, is not decoration on top of geography. It is the geography.
Then there is the dùndún, the West African “talking drum” used by Yorùbá musicians in Nigeria. Researchers led by musicologist Cecilia Durojaye analyzed recordings of the drum against spoken Yorùbá phrases and found that skilled percussionists could accurately replicate the three tones central to the tonal Yorùbá language, allowing the drum to function as what researchers call a speech surrogate. The drum has been used this way to send announcements, warnings, prayers, jokes, proverbs, and poetry across distances long before electronic communication existed. That is not metaphorical talk. Trained listeners can genuinely understand words in the drumbeats.
Some of the most debated research in this space comes from Japanese physician Tadanobu Tsunoda, who in the early 1970s found that native Japanese speakers tended to process vowel sounds and sounds from nature, including insects, in the left hemisphere associated with language, while speakers of other languages processed the same sounds in the right hemisphere associated with music. A more recent study using modern brain imaging found supporting evidence, reporting that a majority of native Japanese speakers showed language-hemisphere dominance for insect sounds, compared to a minority of non-native speakers. I want to be straight with you about this one, because Tsunoda’s original methods have drawn real criticism and the findings remain contested among researchers. But even the debate is telling. Whether or not the exact brain mechanism holds up, it points to something culturally documented and well known in Japan: the sound of cicadas and crickets is treated as a meaningful, almost linguistic, part of the sonic landscape, not filtered out as background noise the way it often is elsewhere.
And then there is Finland, where researchers studying communication style found that Finnish respondents overwhelmingly described themselves using words like silent, quiet, and shy, reflecting a close cultural connection between silence and communication itself. In Finnish social life, a pause is not a gap that needs filling. It is part of the conversation.
Four continents, four completely different relationships to sound, all deeply serious, all internally coherent, none of them universal.
Every Place Has a Sonic Dialect
Here is the reframe I keep coming back to in this work. I do not think about soundscapes as loud or quiet anymore. I think about them as dialects.
A dialect is not a lesser version of a language. It is a full, functioning system shaped by the people who use it. Sonic dialects work the same way. The rainforest listening of the Kaluli, the songlines of Aboriginal Australia, the tonal drumming of Yorùbá musicians, the comfortable silences of a Finnish living room: these are not quirky exceptions to some “normal” way of experiencing sound. They are the normal, each one whole and complete on its own terms.
When you start hearing soundscapes as dialects rather than deviations from a universal standard, the whole project of sonic wellness changes shape. The goal stops being “reduce the decibels” and becomes “understand what this sound means to the people who live inside it.” That is a harder question, and a much better one.
Bringing This Into the Work We Do
This is not an abstract idea for us. It shapes how we run programs, from summer camps to corporate workshops to community listening sessions.
When we take a group of kids on a soundwalk, we do not start by telling them which sounds are good and which are bad. We ask them what they already hear at home, in their own family’s kitchen, on their own block, and we build outward from there. A kid whose household is full of overlapping languages and music has a different sonic dialect than a kid raised in a quieter household, and both are valid starting points for developing sonic literacy.
In corporate workshops, this shows up when we ask teams to describe their ideal work soundscape. The answers vary enormously, and the variance is not noise in the data, it is the data. Some people want low ambient chatter because silence in a shared space reads as tense. Others want near total quiet because any conversation nearby pulls their attention. Neither group is wrong. They are speaking different sonic dialects shaped by different backgrounds, different sensory profiles, and yes, sometimes different cultures.
Community engagement work benefits the most from this framing. When a city wants to redesign a public plaza, the acoustic consultants can measure decibel levels all day, but that will not tell them whether the elderly Vietnamese residents who gather there in the mornings and the teenagers who skateboard through in the afternoon are experiencing the same space as restorative, neutral, or hostile. You have to ask. You have to listen to how people talk about listening.
How to Start Hearing Sonic Dialects Around You
You do not need a research grant to start noticing this. Here is where to begin.
Ask before you assume. The next time you are in a shared space, whether that is a workplace, a family gathering, or a neighborhood block party, ask someone what sound means comfort to them. You will be surprised how specific and how different the answers are.
Pay attention to what gets apologized for. Notice which sounds people rush to explain away or quiet down. That reflex often reveals an unspoken cultural rule about what counts as “too much” sound, and whose comfort that rule was built around.
Learn one sound tradition outside your own. Spend twenty minutes learning about a listening practice from a culture that is not yours, whether that is a songline tradition, a talking drum, a call-and-response singing style, or a silence-centered communication norm. You will start to hear your own habits differently.
Notice what you filter out automatically. Insects, traffic hum, distant conversation, the particular pitch of your refrigerator. The sounds you have trained yourself to ignore say as much about your sonic dialect as the ones you notice.
Bring a mixed group on a soundwalk. Invite people from different backgrounds and ages to listen to the same space together, then compare notes afterward. The gaps between what people heard are often more interesting than the overlaps.
Question “quiet” as a design goal. When you hear a space described as needing to be quieter, ask quieter for whom, and what that quiet is meant to communicate. Sometimes the honest answer is safety. Sometimes it is control.
Keep a running sound journal. For a week, jot down one sound a day that struck you, and one guess at why it might land differently for someone from another background. Small habit, big shift in attention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it true that some cultures cannot hear certain sounds that others can? No, hearing is a physical process that works largely the same across healthy human ears. What differs is attention and meaning: culture shapes which sounds get noticed, remembered, and valued, not whether the ear physically detects them.
Why do some cultures value silence more than others? Silence carries different social meaning depending on communication style. In high-context cultures like Finland, silence often signals respect, trust, and reflection. In many lower-context cultures, silence during conversation can read as discomfort or disengagement.
What is a songline, in simple terms? A songline is an oral map used by Aboriginal Australian communities, encoded in song, that carries navigational routes, ancestral stories, and cultural law across generations, allowing people to “read” the landscape through sound and memory rather than written records.
How does this research apply to city planning? Planners who design soundscapes based only on decibel measurements risk missing what a space actually communicates to the people who use it. Including community listening sessions alongside acoustic data helps designers understand what sound means to different cultural groups, not just how loud it is.
Do I need a background in music or science to start noticing cultural sound differences? No. This work starts with curiosity and attention, not credentials. Asking people what certain sounds mean to them, and noticing your own automatic reactions to sound, is the entire starting point.
The Sound You Were Taught to Hear
Every one of us was raised inside a sonic dialect we never chose and rarely notice. We learned which sounds mean danger and which mean home, which silences are comfortable and which are unbearable, long before we had words for any of it.
That is not a limitation. It is an invitation. Once you know your own listening was taught to you, you can start learning someone else’s, and that is where real sonic wellness begins, not in a single universal standard for what a good soundscape sounds like, but in a genuine curiosity about the ears sitting next to yours.
The next sound that bothers you, or comforts you, might be teaching you more about your own culture than about the sound itself. Listen for it.
Want to practice this kind of listening together? Join a Community HiFi soundwalk and hear your own neighborhood through someone else’s ears, or subscribe to our newsletter for weekly listening prompts and new perspectives on the sonic environments we share.
Keep Learning
- What Your City Sounds Like: A Guide to Urban Soundscape Awareness – Learn the three layers researchers use to break down any acoustic environment.
- What Is Sonic Wellness? A Beginner’s Guide to Auditory Health – The foundational ideas behind intentionally engaging with your auditory environment.
- Your Neighborhood Has a Sound. Here’s How to Describe It. – A practical starting point for building your own sonic vocabulary.
- The Sounds We’re Losing: Preserving Our Auditory Heritage – Why disappearing soundscapes are a cultural loss, not just an environmental one.
- Listening to Your Neighborhood: A Beginner’s Guide to Soundwalking – Step-by-step guidance for the practice referenced throughout this piece.
