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Within this context, everybody inhabits a distinctly individual soundscape, dynamically responding to our surroundings and to others that inhabit it with us. Personalities notwithstanding, our individual sense of sound perception is also influenced by social, cultural and even economic meta-factors that establish the backdrop of our auditory sense of who and where we are. One clear example of this resides in the perceptual artifacts of human sexual dimorphism—the distinct physical traits that define gender and also engender perceptual differences between men and women.1 These gender-based perceptual adaptations influence how each man or woman responds to their surroundings. In the archetypal “hunter/gatherer” social structure this is represented both in terms of the gender roles in the community as well as predictable gender responses to stimulus. A common framing about historic hunter/gatherer community settings is that the chatting, singing, and gossip of women’s work circles was in part a strategy used to keep their community sound alive within an otherwise hostile environment. When the men were off silently hunting in groups, the women—who were somewhat unprotected, would both ward off predators and keep aural tabs on their community by generating a constant flow of sound. The stopping of sound within the women’s circle would trigger fear and signal danger—some threat from outside the circle, perhaps even the abduction of a community member. Conversely, when out stalking their prey or protecting the perimeter of their camp from predators, the men needed to be silent. For the men, a sudden outburst of noise announced an encounter, triggering fear and signaling danger. While the hunter/gatherer society is rapidly disappearing into the blur of globalization, many of the gender influenced perceptual artifacts remain. Women’s desire to speak about, and communicate their emotions may have grown out of a historically accepted role for women to “keep the community fires burning” and to know what is happening within the circle. Meanwhile, men’s traditional need for silence in unpredictable and changing environments may be borne out of their need to silently survey and assess their surroundings when they feel threatened. Somewhere between these two gender perspectives of sound and silence, safety and danger—men and women attempt to communicate. Of course this line of conjecture is an over-simplification of our gender-acoustic responses to our soundscape, illustrating how creatures of the same species can have completely different relationships to sound and silence, hearing and listening. It does not account for the varied qualities of the sounds or the textures of the silence, or the distinctly different relationships that each individual has with sound. There are no real blanket statements that generalize human responses to specific sounds; in the end, most responses to sounds and noises are learned through cultural context, environmental experience, and social setting. For example, some cultures have traditionally been considered “quiet and demure,” while others “loud and boisterous,” but these characteristics have as much to do with their surroundings as with their social predilections. Similarly, physical acuity in sound perception, once considered a “culturally” distinct attribute of some peoples—are more likely due to the acoustic environment of the specific groups rather than any cultural predisposition. For example both the Inuit of the North American continent and the Mabaan people of the Sudan are often referred to in audiology texts as being representative of tribes who have refined hearing because they’ve dwelled in a world of quietude. Comparisons of “normal” and aggravated hearing loss often used these people as benchmarks. The Inuit were once known for their quiet arctic hunting life; the Mabaan didn’t have a drumming tradition and the murmur of their villages was referred to as “quieter than a refrigerator” in one text.2 In their quietude, each of these groups also had very distinct responses to the sounds of their surroundings; the voices of the wind, the rustle of their unique fabrics, and the songs of their har- vests would by nature and setting be very different from each other and from our own culture.