Okay, so, the whole antenna communication with radiowaves thing. Scenario: you're sneaking around a sleeping person with someone and try to talk to said someone faintly, for the lack of a better word. Is this likely to wake the sleeping person? Moreso that making noise?
“Faintly” is a good word for it. I’ve been using mostly visual words to describe the nature of our speech so far. They aren’t perfect, but they convey the experience better than words for describing sound.
You can speak in a normal voice around someone sleeping and you won’t wake them up. Unless you yell, or speak in a more tone that’s more… purple? I’ve avoided using colors to describe voice because the writer has told me that is confusing to humans. But we have special words for where someone’s speech is on the spectrum. In some languages they’re actually the same words for literal colors (although not in Lodenkur).
Since the human language is spoken with grunts and noises, it makes sense that it would wake you up. It’s the same sensation as a dangerous animal making sounds, or anything else from pre-civilization that would have been a danger to you. We are the same way with noise. Something really loud and scary sounding will wake us up frightened and ready to bolt.
But speech is different. Nearly all animals communicate on separate wavelengths. If two species use different wavelengths, then can’t hear each other. Prey animals have much wider ranges of “hearing,” to better identify predators in the area, and there are some notable exceptions… but for the most part, animals have evolved to avoid one another’s frequencies so as to bet communicate most effectively with themselves.
If someone yells in the more purple spectrum, or just really brightly though, it’s probably an emergency. We will definitely wake up for that.