Below the Surface
The underwater realm is not immediately a soundscape for humans.
Sound travels four times faster in water than in air, and human eardrums are too similar in density to water to permit the transduction of most vibrations into tympanic movement in the ear. Moreover, conduction of sound by bone directly to the inner ear undoes differences between left and right, making sound omniphonic: coming from all directions at once.
Naked human ears have the underwater zone not as a soundscape, but as a zone of sonic immanence and intensity: a soundstate.
The underwater circumstance made explicit the transductive work that is the foundation of an immersive soundscape.
