As I was struggling recently to find the right words to convey in English the intentions of an author, who is also a friend and someone that I both like and respect very much, 'Les responded to my expression of desperation with a wonderfully lucid and helpful explanation of what "sound" is and how it works: "Talking About Music". Then another helpful person left a comment with a link to a glossary that looks like an incredibly valuable resource: Sounds like? An Audio Glossary. Even though these responses don't entirely solve my problem, they do bring me ten giant steps closer to being able to at least explain my problem.

The terms that 'Les explains in the first part of her post, as I understand it, are covered in German by the word "Klang". It is indeed an impressive array of words to distinguish among all the fine nuances of sounds that could be described as "Klang", but that is not quite my problem. The enharmonic sounds that 'Les describes are what I understand as "Geräusche" in German, and I am most intrigued by the speculation about why there seem to be more words to describe "Klang" than "Geräusche":

We have the most terms to talk about musical sounds, but the sounds most essential to survival are the non musical ones. A breaking twig does not have harmonically related overtones or sustained duration, but it might mean a predator is about to get you. It might not be a coincidence that so many of our onomatopoetic sounds describe these kinds of noises. Important sounds that communicate practical information.

The word I am looking for, though, is something that corresponds in English to the German word "Schall", a word from physics and medicine, but also from poetry and literature. "Acoustic vibrations perceptible to the ear," according to the dictionary, a perceptible resonance, perhaps more specifically emanating from a potentially identifiable source. In turn, "Beschallung" focuses more on this emanation from a source – it is a sound that is coming from somewhere, it has a direction, a purpose.

The term my friend uses is "Zwangsbeschallung", where the purpose of emitting sound (which may be music to some, but unbearable noise to others) is to influence those who have no choice but to hear it (because we can't close our ears, he says, the way we can close our eyes). It is what you are forced to listen to when you are interminably stuck on hold on the telephone, in the confined space of an elevator, in the much too shiny and bright spaces of supermarkets – the omnipresent and pervasive sound/noise that is meant to make us want something by pretending to be the "soundtrack" of our lives, like the "soundtracks" underlying ads that are supposed to tap into emotions. To be able to object to, protest against, become free from this "Zwangsbeschallung", this "imposed noise", we need to first recognize that it is not simply an irritating but inevitable fact of life, but is, specifically, an imposition – imposed by someone for some reason. Does this kind of "sound" have a name?