it is the concatenation of two fields. first there is the business of recording
and listening to audio - mostly music. from wax cylinders onwards, there is no
doubt that people have enjoyed the recordings of the day and rarely, if ever,
asked for more than the technology of the day offered. even at the height of
the audiophile era. oxygen free copper, gold plated connectors, even direct to
disk or soundstream, all merely tried to do better what was already being done.
there is a second field, connected, sharing and contributing to the first.
that is sound as mathematics and engineering. I will not say it is more
important than the first, but every improvement to the first field has come
from the first. in this we have to measure, find theoretical basis for what we
are observing, and extend from that. it does not have to be that a
theoretically correct recording is pleasing to the ear. it should meet
expectations of the theory as well as it can.
many of practice both fields, some of the confusion also arises from that.
umashankar
> Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 21:31:00 -0700
> From: gre...@math.ucla.edu
> To: e...@elcaudio.com; sursound@music.vt.edu
> Subject: Re: [Sursound] A higher standard of standardness
>
>
> I apologize if people took offense. But the issue is serious.
> It is surely acceptable if people want to make recordings
> that do not sound like what was really there. This does
> not interest me personally all that much, but to each his own
> artistically.
> But surely no one would argue that this freedom to make recordings
> sound as one wishes relieves the field of audio of the obligation
> to know how one woudl reproduce in the best way possible the
> thing that was really there if one wanted to .
>
> Variations from reality ought surely to be based on knowing
> how to reproduce the reality first and then introducing the
> variations. One does not bend pitches for artistic effect
> until one is able to play in tune, so to speak.
>
> If people want to treat recording as a pure art form
> where one simply judges the results on aesthetic grounds.
> it would be hard to say that was wrong. But it surely
> takes recording out of the realm of science.
>
> To my mind, offensive or no, it remains startling to me
> that there is no recorded demo of how various stereo mike
> techniques reproduce the sound of a pink noise source at
> various spots around the recording stage, for example.
> Surely people might want to know whether the mike
> technique was changing the perceived frequency response of sources
> depending on where the sources were?
> How can people NOT want to know this?
>
> And yet, while one can do theoretical calculations, practical
> demonstrations are hard to find. In fact, I am unaware
> of anywhere where such an experiment has been recorded
> and provided to the public.
>
> This is just one of many experiments that would be easy
> enough to do.
>
> I agree with EC that a complete analysis of
> the relationship between recording and musical sound
> would be a tremendous
> task, perhaps one that is not even well defined. But simple
> things like how does pink noise response change with respect
> to position are not hard to analyze at all. One just needs
> to do it.
>
> This is how science works. One works out simple cases
> first. The fact that no one knows if there are infinitely
> many primes pairs with difference 2(eg 17 and 19) does
> not make it irrelevant to know that there are infinitely many
> primes. One answers simple questions first.
>
> Except in audio, where no simple question ever seems to
> get definitively answered and every almost discussion turns into
> mush by means of enlarging the complexity of the situation
> to the point that there are so many variables that no analysis is
> possible without wild difficulties, if at all.
>
> Personally, I would just like to know which mike technique
> does what to the tonal character of sources at different
> locations around the recording stage. If you don't care, you
> don't care. But I wish I had a disc where I could listen
> and find out. I find it hard to believe that other people
> are not interested in this.
>
> Science works like that:one step at a time. Assuming that
> people are interested in science.
>
> Years ago I decided to learn the piano(I am a violinist!)
> just to see how it would go, by learning the Rachmaninoff 3rd
> piano concerto --a measure at a time. As you can imagine I
> did not get very far! (the first statement of the theme
> went ok but soon, no soap). Of course this was a joke!
> I knew from experience of learning to play the violin
> that one learns the basics step by step and builds
> up to the complex pieces over a long time.
>
> Audio seems to be missing a lot of the basics.
>
> Robert
>
> PS There is a good bit of this sort of thing about
> LOCALIZATION. But not so much about timbre.
>
>
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