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I admit I made an assumption when I said microphones can't capture certain sounds. I should instead have said: There are overtones picked up by the ear that yo

by yoos 15y ago

I admit I made an assumption when I said microphones can't capture certain sounds. I should instead have said: There are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone and accurately play back with average computer speakers, at least in my experience. Whether the loss in quality is the microphone's fault or the speakers' fault, I don't know. Regardless, there are sounds the musician hears and feels that not even the average in-person audience can hear, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's impossible to accurately judge violins based on digital recordings.

jpitz 15y ago
This, I can buy. More so even lossy codecs over crappy speakers. I am wary of the argument that there exists this great gap between average listeners and trained musicians. There is a training gap, surely, but IMHO the raw auditory discrimination capacity just isn't all that different. I'm just a dumb brass player, but trumpets all sounds very, VERY distinct from one another to me, generally. I attribute that to practice, not acuity.
- yoos 15y ago
  Hmm.. I'm not entirely sure if by the "gap", you were referring to this, but just to clarify: When I said there are sounds the musician hears and feels the audience cannot, I wasn't referring to the ability to pick out different sounds, but rather the physical impossibility of certain sounds (e.g., higher-frequency overtones, squeaking strings, rasping strings) to be heard beyond a certain distance away from the instrument being played. To go off on even more of a tangent, I sometimes feel bad that not enough people get a chance to listen to musical performances up close. I mean really close, with the musician in front of them in the same room so they can hear "almost" everything. "Almost" because, at least for violins, you can't hear or feel everything until you actually play the instrument (can any violinist here vouch for this?). This is especially so because the chinrest transfers some of the vibrations to the ear through the bone, and there are sounds made by the bow and strings that only the person playing can hear simply because they are too quiet, and that only during quiet pieces, etc. I've never played a Strad, nor do I have much experience, but I wonder if nearly irrelevant details such as these are a part of what sets the best instruments apart from the rest?
  - jpitz 15y ago
    re: the gap: I wondered that a little too, but being a dumb brute of a brass player, not too much. My command of the dynamic range dominates the loud end, I'm afraid. I agree that performances are vastly better experienced in person. A doctor recently was allowed to subject a museum Stradivarius to a CAT scan. Hopefully we'll be learning more about what truly distinguishes these instruments.

by yoos 15y ago

jpitz 15y ago

This, I can buy. More so even lossy codecs over crappy speakers. I am wary of the argument that there exists this great gap between average listeners and trained musicians. There is a training gap, surely, but IMHO the raw auditory discrimination capacity just isn't all that different. I'm just a dumb brass player, but trumpets all sounds very, VERY distinct from one another to me, generally. I attribute that to practice, not acuity.

yoos 15y ago
Hmm.. I'm not entirely sure if by the "gap", you were referring to this, but just to clarify: When I said there are sounds the musician hears and feels the audience cannot, I wasn't referring to the ability to pick out different sounds, but rather the physical impossibility of certain sounds (e.g., higher-frequency overtones, squeaking strings, rasping strings) to be heard beyond a certain distance away from the instrument being played. To go off on even more of a tangent, I sometimes feel bad that not enough people get a chance to listen to musical performances up close. I mean really close, with the musician in front of them in the same room so they can hear "almost" everything. "Almost" because, at least for violins, you can't hear or feel everything until you actually play the instrument (can any violinist here vouch for this?). This is especially so because the chinrest transfers some of the vibrations to the ear through the bone, and there are sounds made by the bow and strings that only the person playing can hear simply because they are too quiet, and that only during quiet pieces, etc. I've never played a Strad, nor do I have much experience, but I wonder if nearly irrelevant details such as these are a part of what sets the best instruments apart from the rest?
- jpitz 15y ago
  re: the gap: I wondered that a little too, but being a dumb brute of a brass player, not too much. My command of the dynamic range dominates the loud end, I'm afraid. I agree that performances are vastly better experienced in person. A doctor recently was allowed to subject a museum Stradivarius to a CAT scan. Hopefully we'll be learning more about what truly distinguishes these instruments.