“BUT WHY WOULD A CAR ON A WET ROAD SOUND DIFFERENT TO A CAR ON A DRY ROAD?”
It’s the details that astonish me. We humans live inside a complicated deluge of information, with constant light and sound waves whooshing through an environment that is defined by temperature, texture and smell. Yet sometimes your brain manages to pluck something incredibly subtle out of the flood. Recently, I woke up in the morning in an unfamiliar city, and before I had even opened my eyes, I knew that it had rained overnight. When I poked my subconscious a bit to find out why I was so sure, I realised that it was the traffic noise. The sound of cars going past was softer than normal, but I couldn’t hear rain. My brain immediately concluded that there was a thin layer of water on the road outside. But why would a car on a wet road sound different to a car on a dry road? Come to that, why do car tyres make any noise at all?
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