Here is the truth!
I have spent a LOT of time at live musical events(when
the music was not too interesting , while I waited
for what I came to hear or just sat through if I had
gone for some social reason only) listening with my eyes closed
to whether one could hear the distance of things.
My admittedly informal conclusion is that one cannot except
if things are very near by(e.g. near by instruments in the
orchestra when I am playing). In the audience at a fair distance
from the orchestra, one has some impression that the orchestra
is not really close. It sounds tonally different from what it
would sound like up close and the shape of the dynamics is different
(more reverb field, less direct arrival).
But where is the orchestra? It is just kind of "out there".
THere is no real feeling of exactly how far it is out there
at all, none to speak of.
It seems to me pretty clear that such a rather vague and generalized
feeling prevents--for this type of music--the whole idea of
distance from being really important musically.
Theoretically, yes, musically no--one just does not hear it.
The trouble with stereo is that it is too close and too little.
Surrounds to make for realism (of orchestral music) needs to make
the orchestra seem either larger or further away---because 2 speaker
stereo does tend to localize things at a fairly definite distance,
more or less at the plane of the speakers--unless you do it awfully well
and then it doesn't do that so much.
Stereo orchestral music sounds weird because it is tonally close
(usually) but physically way too small for the tonal closeness and
the plane of the speakers closeness just makes things even worse.
WHen you are 15 feet from it, an orchestra--being about 60 feet wide
usually--subtends a huge angle and is LARGE. And actually at that close
range it has front to back depth too--that is still close enough for that.
Robert
On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, dave.mal...@york.ac.uk wrote:
Hi all,
I think that one of the problems with all these discussions is that we tend
to think of the distance of an audio object as being the exactly the same
sort of thing as the coordinates of the object w.r.t. the listener - but it's
not because, unlike direction, we humans can't determine it absolutely, but
only as implied via the object's (and our) interaction with the environment.
For a unknown distant stationary source in an anechoic environment there are
_no_ cues as to distance, unless the listener can move and gain something via
parallax or loudness variation. For close sources (i.e. in the curved
wavefront zone) there may be some cues from bass lift, but even these would
be ambiguous for median plane sources if head turning is not allowed
(Greene-Lee head brace, anyone?)
Dave M.
On Jul 20 2011, Dave Hunt wrote:
Hi,
Modelling distance, and controlling it on a per source basis, is founded
on sound physical principles and can be made 'convincing', even with low
order ambisonics. Agreed that it is 'bolted on', though synthesis (being
the converse of analysis) involves controlling a large number of
parameters to simulate what occurs naturally.
Even WFS, as described in the literature, suggests that sources be
recorded individually as dry and close as possible, and the 'scene' then
reconstructed on playback. So it too synthesises distance.
Ciao,
Dave Hunt
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