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This is true that the brain will filter out steady state noise, but this effect is much less strong once a signal has been recorded. Basically, on playback, th
by b1daly 10y ago
This is true that the brain will filter out steady state noise, but this effect is much less strong once a signal has been recorded.
Basically, on playback, the steady state noise sounds much louder than it did when you are actually present in the room.
The same holds for the reverberation in a room, it will sound much louder on a recording than on location.
For example, if you record someone speaking in a reverberant space like a church, it will sound like they are in a very reverberant space. Which they are, when you are listening live, your brain filters out the "non-direct" sounds so you notice just the voice.
I'm pretty sure these noise filtering processes are related to the high priority the brain puts on understanding speech.
- riprowan 10y agoAll true. However FM radio always has white noise, so adding a little bit to it is probably better than adding any correlated noise from signal processing. FFT noise reduction definitely has its place and I do use it from time to time. I just highly doubt "live on-air signal processing" is a good application given that the noiseprint is constantly changing.
- tacos 10y agoThese broad generalizations about psychoacoustics are simply not accurate. It sounds like what every novice engineer experiences before honing his or her craft. If you're surprised by what you hear after recording something, either you weren't listening properly while recording it, you haven't learned how to record it properly yet, or your recording/listening environment itself is flawed. Of course we notice different things about an object after taking a picture of it. But you've got to be very careful about cause/effect/bias.
- b1daly 10y agoI've been a professional recording engineer for 20 years. The phenomena I'm discussing is an objectively true, subjective perceptual effect, it doesn't change based on how long you've been recording. Over time you learn to expect it, but it doesn't go away. A lot of audio engineering involves working around the heavy real time signal processing our brain is always doing. That's interesting about animals. It seems likely that their auditory systems would be tuned for the type of stimuli that are vital for their survival. There would be a lot of overlap, but since it's hard to tell their subjective experience, it would take some clever testing to see how their perception of recorded sound would differ.
- tdaltonc 10y agoNon-human animals have all the same "noise canceling hardware" as humans (It's mostly in the hind-brain), so it can't just be for speech. I know that that echo/noise canceling hardware plays a big role in sound localization. This is probably why the noise and echoes sound louder on a recording. They don't change the way that they should when I move my head, so my brain can't figure out how to cancel them.