Episode Transcript
FAWN: [00:00:00] In a world of zeros and ones technology and synthetic products like perfumes that are made to make you think you're smelling nature, and your nose feels like, "Oh, this is natural," until you come across the real deal, and your nose will remember, "Ah, no, this is the real deal." Today, we're talking about voice and how it connects us and how it deceives us with friendship.
Here we go. Welcome to our friendly world, everybody. This is- Hey, everyone ... Fawn and Matt, Matt and Fawn. So bear with me. Bear with me, everybody. I came across something I had to look up on how the voice gets transmitted.
Like I'm speaking to you right now into a microphone, or I'm speaking to you on the [00:01:00] phone, or we're communicating via Zoom, whatever technology it is. I wanted to really understand how it works, so I looked it up. I'm gonna monologue a little bit and really go over how it all works, even from the beginning, from the invention of the telephone.
How do our voices get connected? What is it exactly? And we'll bring it back to friendship. So step one, your voice creates vibrations. When you speak, air from your lungs passes through your vocal cords. Your vocal cords vibrate, creating sound waves in the air. So as you say, "Hello," you're actually creating tiny changes at the air pressure that ripple outward like waves in a pond. And then two, the phone's microphones listen with a very thin [00:02:00] membrane called a diaphragm.
When your voice reaches it, the diaphragm vibrates in exactly the same pattern as your voice. So if your voice goes up... Let me say it this way. If, if your voice goes up, down, louder, softer, the diaphragm moves up and down
In the same way. Three, vibrations become electrical signals
The microphone connects these vibrations into electronic signals. So it, it translates. Sound becomes electricity. The electrical signal now carries all the information about your voice, the pitch, the volume, the tone, the timing. Electricity becomes digital information. So modern phones then convert these [00:03:00] signals into numbers thousands of times every second. So the phone samples your voice and creates a digital representation.
It's like taking thousands of tiny snapshots of your voice every second.
Now your voice exists as data. All right, so then we go to step five. That was four. Five, the data travels. Cell towers, fiber optics cables, sometimes satellites, internet networks Depending on where the other person is
You might travel hundreds or thou- your voice, that is, might travel Hundreds or thousands of miles in a fraction of a second. Much of the journey today happens as, um, pulses of light racing through glass fibers
Then we go through-- we go to step six. [00:04:00] The other phone rebuilds your voice. So when the data... Is it data or data, Matt?
MATT: Yes.
FAWN: Okay. So when the data arrives, the receiving phone reverses this whole process. It converts numbers to electrical signals to speaker vibrations. The phone speaker has another diaphragm that vibrates to recreate the original sound waves.
These vibrations push air. The air reaches the listener's ears, and they hear, "Hello." And then seven, your brain finishes the job The sound coming out of the speaker is not a perfect copy of your original voice. It's an approximation. But the human brain is incredibly good at recognizing voices. Your friend's brain instantly says, "That's Matt," even though the sound [00:05:00] has been turned into vibrations, electricity, numbers that were sent across networks and turned back into sound, all in less than a second.
I was thinking about this because I was speaking with a very holy person, and they were talking about prayers need to be done in person. Um, certain prayers, certain holy texts need to be heard in person, not even using a microphone. And this really touched me because I was like, speaking of touch, it goes back to how we need physical touch.
So we need to be close to each other. We need to hear the original source of something. We need to smell the actual flower and not depend on chemistry to put some perfume on you and say, "Hey, this is a rose." No. [00:06:00] And after some time, we, we become fooled into thinking, "Oh, that's a rose," until we come across the rose, the original, and you're like, "Whoa, this is the rose."
You know the difference. And when we come back together again, when we're in person, when we're having, uh, a one-on-one in the same room and really hearing each other-
MATT: Mm-hmm ...
FAWN: I think it's a profound change. But as we were just discussing a few minutes ago upstairs with our kids, yeah, people are tired. We're tired.
We're so, the four-letter word, busy. It's almost impossible. And it's wonderful to have Zoom and the telephone and everything. Without those, I would be in big trouble. Because most of my friends are thousands of miles away.
MATT: Right.
FAWN: So there we have it. You know, being fooled into thinking we have [00:07:00] complete connection, but the connection is just a sample
MATT: Right. We're getting a sanitized version, period. It's, it's, it's not as bad as getting texts back and forth where somebody can think about what they're gonna say and then respond back just so perfectly, but we are hearing an approximation, and it gets even worse with the internet too.
One thing you didn't mention was, you know, first off, God, I've spent far too long, I, I converted my entire CD library into MP3, right? But 44 KHz, that's 44 thou- sa- 44,000 samples per second, which is great. When you actually deal with it traveling across the internet to you, guess what? It doesn't even arrive in the same order it was sent necessarily.
So the computer has to keep track of what's where and jam it all back together the way it's supposed to be in a way and, and do it fast enough in order for you not to hear it stop for a second. Do you [00:08:00] remember when the internet used to, like, stop and buffering, buffering, buffering? Doesn't do that anymore.
Our connections are faster, but also I think it throws out stuff if it doesn't have it in time, uh, if it's not enough, if it's, if it's not enough for us to realize. But where it gets weird is, you know, it gets even worse. TVs flicker. They still do. They flicker so fast we can't tell, or can we? Um, colors on-
FAWN: That's why we get so tired
MATT: colors on our computers.
FAWN: Mm-hmm.
MATT: Again, it's an approximation. It can show a million colors, but there are people who s- who can tell the difference between colors consciously. Do we tell the difference between colors subconsciously?
FAWN: Yeah.
MATT: It starts to get, it starts to get a lot of fun as we're taking a look at a kind of this, uh, imitation, very convincing imitation, and it's certainly better and b- and it gets [00:09:00] better every year.
But one of, one of the things I like to thump out against is better versus good. Is it good? It's certainly better than what we had before. And, and oftentimes people get confused, and they equate better with good. You know? Mm-hmm. Better, yes. Good?
FAWN: Mm-hmm.
MATT: I don't know. I don't know. I honestly don't know
FAWN: This is why I yearn so much for a community to, to be around people.
And we are around people, but we're not, you know? We're not friends. In most cases, the neighbors turn out to be enemies because whatever, HOA problems, whatever it is, right? It's just, um... I don't know. We ha- I, I think just to realize this right now, it may seem kind of depressing, [00:10:00] but to realize if this is what it is, to just make a declaration of w- you know, "I want the real thing in person.
I want always to be with the original."
MATT: Right. And, and honestly, you know, I fell in love with the unsanitized version of you. You fell in love with the unsanitized version of me. Would you have fallen in love with me if you had, if, if... Or would I have had I not smelled the top of your head? Would you have if I didn't smell like vanilla?
FAWN: I mean, I guess maybe there- I don't know ... there would've been other clues. But I mean, there were some clues where we were sparring at the martial arts school, and I could hear you smelling my hair. Just breathing. And it wasn't, it wasn't a normal thing. I could tell you were breathing in, smelling the scent of whatever, whatever was in my hair.
Do you know what I'm saying?
MATT: Mm-hmm.
FAWN: And [00:11:00] that made me go, "Huh, what's happening?" You know what I mean? There were a lot of i- instances like that- Right ... that if we were just on the phone... Or I don't even wanna talk about the phone because a lot of times after school, martial arts school, we would get on the phone and talk un- until the wee hours of the night, but you would fall asleep.
MATT: But we, we had that physical, we had already had that physical presence with each other.
FAWN: Yeah.
MATT: When- We- Yeah ... we had physical... We hung out, yes.
FAWN: Right. Right. And that's... And, and not just us. I mean, ours resulted in marriage, but just being there resulted in friendships.
MATT: True.
FAWN: Right?
MATT: Yes.
FAWN: And, and a community.
MATT: Well, it's a true sharing.
Sharing an experience is a very powerful thing.
FAWN: Yeah. So this is going back to that. But this whole sound thing and, and basically the senses, right? Smelling, hearing w- are the just two examples I brought up today. [00:12:00] I think we should remember that so that we, again, not to reiterate what I said, but to go back to the source.
MATT: Right. Go a little d- spending time in the analog. If we think about it, frankly, we could argue that virtual reality was an attempt to completely distance ourselves, and by and large, that hasn't panned out the way it was supposed to. And every-
FAWN: What was it supposed to do?
MATT: It was supposed to Like put us in a place where we didn't need to be in the physical presence of others basically is one way of thinking about it.
We could travel anywhere. We could fly. We could do anything. I think- And that is certainly attractive, and there's certainly those adherents, and God knows I've s- I've spent enough time inside of a, a virtual reality world. But it's, it's a poor substitute for reality.
FAWN: Mm-hmm.
MATT: And it's always going to be that way.
Well, [00:13:00] I'm sorry. Always is a scary world nowadays, but for the foreseeable future, it, it, it has proven to be a poor substitute.
FAWN: And it's not always a poor substitute. I mean, it's a great addition, but we need the real deal.
MATT: Well, yes. When- whenever and however we can get it. But it, it's certainly better than not having it.
But is it good?
FAWN: Hmm.
MATT: So grab a friend, go hang out, be in the presence.
FAWN: Yeah. Well, what friend? Like what?
MATT: Go out into the world and experience.
FAWN: You know, I think this is why people have always been drawn to coffee shops. They may not know anyone, they may not be speaking to anyone, but it's interesting. I mean, we, we come from that culture.
What... You know, like a lot of writers would always go downstairs to the coffee shop and just bring out their laptops, [00:14:00] and they would work there for hours at a time. They could easily do that in their home, but why? Why choose a coffee shop? They're surrounded by people. You're hearing voices for real, right?
There's a reason why coffee shops are always so popular. Just to sit there, you feel different, don't you? You do. Or is it just me?
MATT: You do. You feel perhaps like you're starting to belong.
FAWN: You feel a connection.
MATT: You feel a connection.
FAWN: Uh, and I dare say that, you know how we need human touch, even if you're not being touched by someone, your...
Their voices are actually touching your skin.
MATT: True.
FAWN: Like, you know, we just got into how the voice travels, right? The vibrations touch your skin and touch your organs, touch your cells, and it transforms us. But having said that, thank you for listening to us through the mic. We appreciate it.
MATT: Very much.
FAWN: And always, we will [00:15:00] be speaking to you soon.
Thank you so much for listening. Take care. Have a lovely every day.
MATT: Be well.
