We use the term “higher” to describe notes of smaller wavelengths, and this term seems strangely fitting in a way that I don’t quite understand. For example, when a band is playing heavy bass notes and then a singer comes in with treble notes, it seems like the vocal notes are actually physically *higher* (like, in the room or in my ears) than the bass notes.
Is this a real thing? Or am I just imagining it? Or is it just subconscious association with the words “high” and “low” which we use to describe these notes? Or maybe I’m just noticing that speakers and venues usually put the woofers on the bottom and the tweeters on the top?
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I’m surprised no one has mentioned music notation yet. Most of us have seen written music, whether or not we can read it, and we know intuitively that the notes that are higher on the staff are higher tones as well. Just like we assume A is first and Z is last, literacy shapes how we view things.
I experience this when I’m producing music, and I’m pretty sure that for the most part, it’s just a learned illusion, a kind of synesthesia where we’ve learned to associate notes going higher as actually going “up” in some sense. The association of higher frequencies with the feelings of lightness, flight, soaring, are pretty common across most styles of music, especially in movie scores, so it’s only natural that our brains would learn to interpret it that way as we’re exposed to music in contexts where higher notes take on that meaning.
That’s also reinforced by music notation, whether you’re reading a classical score or looking at notes drawn in a computer, as well as the hand signs [for the solfege scale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkW4v_MJEUg). Another reason it’s ingrained in our culture.
That all suggests to me that the majority of the effect is explained by a cultural association between higher notes and lofty, flighty emotions, but there are at least a couple possible objective reasons for it:
1. On most speakers, the tweeters that play the high frequencies are above the woofers which play the mid and low frequencies. This is pretty noticeable when you play with vertical speaker placement in a well-treated room, but it doesn’t apply if you’re listening on headphones or on a small Bluetooth speaker. At large concert venues, bass generally travels further with less loss of power so you have tweeters and midrange woofers literally overhead the audience to boost the volume (mad respect to the engineers who figure out how to do that without making it sound like a shitty PA system with a huge delay or super late bass).
2. We’re not as good at localizing lower frequencies as we are at localizing higher frequencies. Because of the much longer wavelength, it’s harder for our ears to tell exactly where a very low note is located. With a ~100Hz bass note for example, it sounds more like the whole room is resonating at that frequency; I can put my subwoofer on the left or right of my room and I can’t really tell where it is just by listening. On the other hand, a 1kHz+ signal sounds like it has a more well-defined position; at those smaller wavelengths, our ears/brain can pick up the direction and reflections off of walls and actually locate the sound to a [Phantom center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_center) between the speakers. The fact that higher frequencies are easier to localize, whereas lower frequencies are more amorphous and room-filling might play a role in explaining the effect.
A last note, in favor of the idea that most of the effect is learned through association, is that that “high-passed” (meaning, had all but their high frequencies cut out) bass notes still sound physically “below” higher notes to me. At the physical level, they are only made up of high frquencies, yet they still sound physically below to me, which suggests that points (1) and (2) don’t actually account for much of the effect, and it’s more based on an interpretation of music that’s pervasive within our culture. (It’s a well-known effect that when you high-pass a bass note, [it still sounds like the same note, even though the lower frequencies are not present](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental))
When I’m EQing a mix, I do strongly feel an association between high/low frequency and up/down in physical space, but I’m pretty confident that’s just a way my brain has learned to present the information to me after a lot of practice, and isn’t really “there” in any physical sense.
I think most of what you’re experiencing is perceptive but there is some truth to bass being closer to the floor than the ceiling.
Music is pressure waves moving through air, which bounce off surfaces in the listening environment and into our ears. High frequency sounds are more prone to bouncing than low frequency sounds are. And high frequency sounds are more easily absorbed by soft surfaces (furnishings) than low frequency sounds are.
In practical terms what that means is more of the low frequency sound “stays” in the room. And depending on where you position yours ears relative to the sound source, you could be hearing low frequency sounds at a higher volume than what they’re supposed to be. It’s like when ripples in a pond meet each other with the right speed and direction, they combine to make a bigger ripple. Sound is basically ripples in the air.
When somebody is designing a professional listening environment like a recording studio, they need to control that “buildup” of bass. That is commonly done by placing “bass traps” on the floor in the corners of the room. They’re not commonly placed at ceiling level.
In a perfect environment I can’t say that low frequency notes are physically lower. But in a normal room with uncontrolled bouncing and dampening, they end up closer to the floor than the ceiling.
Different languages use different metaphors and their speakers feel pitch accordingly. There’s no real reason it’s high/low and not thin/thick or narrow/wide out any other pair of opposites
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