Guermantes
Senior Member
I find that adaptation doesn't generally cause listener fatigue, but it can in some environments. For example, I find overly live listening rooms (or headphones!) fatiguing. And adapting to the loud background noise while talking to someone in a restaurant or party can become fatiguing. Of course, I wonder whether the fatigue is caused by the loud noise or the adaptation. I think both contribute.
I would say both but may depend on how easy the adaption is. As the process is one of extracting something meaningful (e.g. linguistic or musical) from the perceptual environment, then the harder it is to extract that meaning (i.e. the concentration required) is probably proportional to the fatigue induced.
I find it more fatiguing working with poor SNR recordings when attempting to extract intelligible speech from "noise" (this is a large part of my job).
I find it more fatiguing to sit down and follow a score while listening to an orchestral piece due to the concentration involved in processing parallel symbolic (reading notes on a page) and indexical (hearing musical pitches in a harmonic relationship) semiotic inputs.
I also find it more fatiguing to extract meaning from conversations in my second language than in my native tongue, especially if the speech is highly idiomatic and relies heavily on connotation. What is subconscious in the native language becomes a very conscious process in the second one.
That said, acoustic environments can convolve with sounds to enhance their meaning. Simple choral works like plainchant can take on a whole new resonance in reflective acoustics such as a cathedral. In this case, we are not trying to parse a complex harmonic structure or understand precisely what is being sung (unless we are fluent in Latin), instead we are hearing the convolution as part of an overall aesthetic (think of the famous example of Allegri's Miserere written for the Sistine Chapel). I suggest we actually are hearing the room as an integral part of the performance and this may not be fatiguing at all. Then, when someone gets up to give a speech or sermon in the same environment, we have to hear through the room to extract the linguistic information. Suddenly the acoustics may be hindering that process. Same room but different modes of listening.