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Path: utzoo!watmath!hachong
From: hachong@watmath.UUCP (Herb Chong)
Newsgroups: net.audio
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Tighter bass and edgeless piano
Message-ID: <16600@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Sep-85 23:31:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.16600
Posted: Wed Sep 25 23:31:07 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Sep-85 08:32:35 EDT
References: <1636@druxu.UUCP> <16538@watmath.UUCP> <19@nbs-amrf.UUCP>
Reply-To: hachong@watmath.UUCP (Herb Chong)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 148
Summary: 

In article <19@nbs-amrf.UUCP> manheimer@nbs-amrf.UUCP (Ken Manheimer) writes:
>> ever notice how different music is when you're at a concert when compared
>> to a recording of the same concert being made under the same conditions
>> (i.e. same microphone location as yourself and audience).  the differences
>> are not in the sound so much as the experience, and that cannot yet be
>> reproduced.

>I think the clouding may be in my interpretation of the notion of the
>distinction between experience and facsimile.  This could implies a few
>things, among them one that i'd like to emphasize (as briefly as i can)
>as my candidate for the guts of the measurability issue.

>First, i consider the misleading interpretation of 'actual experience'
>vs.  facsimile to be in the incidental, non-sound components of in person
>musical experiences - e.g.  the nostalgic odor of perfume/pot wafting
>gently in the breeze, the depth of emotion in the performers/audiences/
>hot dog vendors expression, etc.  I hope this wasn't the intended idea of
>the article - it's too peripheral an argument, there's enough to consider
>in the fact that any facsimile is bound to have lost to *some* degree the
>sound content of a musical envent without being diverted by the
>incidentals (pleasant though they may be).

i think that some psychologists may disagree with you.  the
expectations of the experience combined with the reactions of the
people around you can provide a strong influence on your perception of
the concert as a whole and has some influence on your preception of the
musical quality.  the degree of training you have and the initial
approach to listening at the concert can negate most of the effects of
the incidental aspects of a concert.  it would be far different if you
were grading a piano recital than going to a Springsteen concert.
(BTW, i'm mostly talking classical concerts here in a more restrained
atmosphere.) however, there are very few of us who would feel that the
music were lousy if everyone else around us were standing and cheering
after a particularly rousing performance unless we approached it with
the conviction that it was going to be lousy not matter what anyone
else says..  what is it that makes it a 'rousing' performance?  is it
the purely technical aspects of reproducing the music? how much of that
translates into our perception of the quality of reproduction of
music?  hopefully none when evaluating.  does having heard a live
performance influence hearing the same piece played by the same people
being reproduced by a stereo?  well, that depends.  i'm not sure i have
an answer to that question.  i do know that preconcieved notions of
the quality of different pieces of stereo equipment can mask all but the
largest of differences except to a trained ear, and training that ear requires
a lot of listening under unbiased circumstances.

>The issue that holds so much interest for me is the difficulties in
>parameterizing, not experience, but the underlaying events.  I make
>this distinction because i think that the way people apprehend events is
>limited at the onset by parameterization that is a necessary component of
>human experiencing.  The catch is that we have the capacity to extend the
>finess of our ability to apprehend in this way, meaning that we're
>constantly being let down by growing out of previously useful ways of
>parameterizations.  This doesn't only happen for individuals; the
>refinement and revolution of science represents the same process of
>resolution.

the more you listen, training the ear,  the more you are able to detect
before the purely psychological confuses the issue.  this, of course,
is a gross generalization, but you get the idea.  and better equipment
helps, but, we can only vaguely define better.  lower THD, less IMD,
higher slew rates, better SNR, more power, flatter frequency response,
these are all indications of better, but only indications.  these happen
to be some of the more easily measured things.

>What does this have to do with analyzing the accuracy of sound
>reproduction, where sound can be entirely captured in terms of varying
>sound pressure waves?  Even getting a close aproximation to a 'simple'
>event using mathematical function introduces complicated, never entirely
>resolved issues of accuracy.  Given that any facsimile is bound to differ
>from the original event it represents to some degree, we have to decide
>on ways to compare the merits of different variations from the original,
>and that's where the difficulties come in.  The frequency content of the
>signal does *not* constitute the whole story.

even when using a complex circuit to model a speaker load to an amplifier,
many simplifications are made because of complexity of calculation (no longer
a valid excuse in this day of the computer) or we simply don't understand
the process.  given that we are approximating, the design people are
simpy saying that, at some point, this is close enough to perfection that
the vast majority of our customers will not notice, and even we're not
sure we will either

>The example herb gave (above) for the misplayed flute comes near to
>expressing my point - rather than considering the difference between
>players who blows on different (right and wrong ends) of the flute,
>consider the difference between an talented intermediate player's and a
>talented master's rendition of some specific piece of music - both of
>their performances will vary from the piece as intended by the composer,
>yet there will usually be a clear consensus in the audience as to
>preference for the renditions.  Furthermore, the master's presentation
>may, on occasion, diverge more dramatically from what is embodied in the
>strict interpretation of the written tablature, yet could still be
>apprehended to be closer to the intentions of the composer.  The
>imperfection lies in the narrowness of the analytic expression of the
>music (the tablature), not in the interpretation of the master.  This
>argument may be more metaphoric than analogous to the characterization of
>sound by mathematical analysis, but i think it is important.

again, people who are call the person the master are basing their
evaluation upon experience.  they have listened to enough works to know
not only what the instrument should sound like, but also what nuances
that only a master can coax from his instrument.  recognizing those
nuances requires experience, and along with that experience, a
knowledge base to compare to.  i was at a concert of amateur chamber
players and the person playing the cello part turned the page at the
wrong time.  since it was an unfamiliar piece to me, i didn't notice
anything until the quartet stopped and burst out laughing and
apologized to the audience.  it sounded okay to me, but i was hardly in
a position to tell.  incidentally, i was going to use a dhigeridu as an
example, but i forget whether it is played through the nose or the
mouth.  can anyone enlighten me?

>Easuring the pure tones that a flute player is able to produce is not
>sufficient to decide how good the player is.  Furthermore, measuring the
>frequency content of the performances isn't going to tell you much about
>the relative merits of the performances, because we *don't know how to
>characterize the quality of a piece of music in terms of it's harmonic
>content*, or even harmonic/ melodic/etc.  progress.  SIMILARLY, we're
>limited in our analytic grasp on the cogent features crucial to sounds.
>I feel it's in the course of experience that we engage our intuitive
>sense to guide us in tuning our analytic sense of what's important, not
>the other way around; that increased resolution can be gained by
>profiting on the knowledge encoded in the analytic representation, but
>the analytic representation generally (always?) has room for extension.

like an airline pilot, we ignore the unimportant gauges until something
looks wrong, then we look to see what is wrong.  music reproduction is
this way in a sense.  if the sound is like what we have heard before
then we are hardly going to notice anything wrong.  so we are satisfied
with our stereo system.  then we go listen to our friend with the
$25,000 sound system and we hear what it should sound like, and then we
go back to our little system at home, and it doesn't sound nearly as
good anymore.  some of it is psychological (a system that expensive HAS
to sound good) but a lot of it is also because it it better and allows
us to hear what it should be like without flaws.  however, there is
still great disagreement over what is an acceptable level of flaws and
how do we measure it.  the specs you see published are the best we can
do today.

Herb Chong...

I'm user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble....

(will disappear September 30)
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