Re: [Harp-L] Re: music and perception




I've developed the theory that when we are
enjoying a piece of music our brains may be responding, or playing
along by creating additional, contributory vibrations in the ear.

Jerry Allison from the Crickets said that it was not uncommon for people to come up to them after a Buddy Holly show and compliment the boys on the back-up vocals.


The problem was that nobody sang backup on those shows, they didn't even have mics. There were of course backup vocals on the records.

Of greater relevance may be the whole MP3 thing. The folks who developed it are said to have used the idea that our ears didn't hear everything in a wav file. There is apparently a psychological component in there, too.

Some times MP3's will sound fine to me, other times the same MP3's sound just lousy.

It gets weirder. MP3's generally sounded really fine to my ears. Then I did a project where I encoded some CDs using M4a, also known as AAC Advanced. It was developed by the same people who developed MP3. It was a real revelation.

M4a sounds so vastly much better - to me - than MP3 and WMA now that I can often tell which type of file I'm listening to in a couple of seconds, and MP3 and WMA just bug the heck out of me quite often. M4a absolutely never sounds lousy to me.

I have to wonder if eardrum shenanigans are part of the mix in this regard.

I have several engineer friends who have a rule: Eight hours max. Anything that sounds lousy the next day but was recorded or mixed within the span of an 8 hour session will be repaired at their expense. Any mistakes made after 8 hours must be covered by the client. Those engineers universally blame ear drum fatigue.

Here's a weird non-eardrum phenomenon I have encountered recently. I just did 17 days of editing on a project. I could only work for 2.5 hour lumps. After that mark the timings of all my edits sounded horrible - way off. I have encountered this in the past, though not so frequently as during these editing sessions, where it was a constant. I'd go away for about 90 minutes, mainly just goofing off, napping, annoying my cats. I'd then go back into my mixing space and, like magic, all my timings were right and true. Then I'd have another 2.5 hours before it'd all blow up again.

The cats are still recovering from this project.

K





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