Steve Mumford wrote: > Any discussion of measuring sound quality by machine needs to > contain the caveat that only a portion of the sound is measured by > the machine.
With all due respect, I think this is slightly innacurate. In fact, ALL the sound is recorded and measured by the machine. It is the _perception_ of the sound that is not measured. This is an important difference. It is important because our perception may be totally different from, say, the audience's perception. When I am in a foul mood or down on my horn playing, often I will record myself and listen to recordings I have made when in a great mood. The differences are not nearly as great as I would think. Or, e.g., my Beethoven 3 excerpt sounds really muddy to me, but I have been assured by listeners and by my computer that the actual sound is clean. The reason it sounds muddy/unclear is because I don't have the mental facility to pay attention to both creating the sound and listening/analyzing for such fast notes. > A large part of what we hear is created by our own ears > and will not show up on the graph. Our ears can measure much more > accurately than any machine. That's actually not true, either, depending on what you talk about. As a blanket statement, it's certainly not accurate. For example, pitch discrimination, intonation measurement, etc. can be done on a scale that few humans could ever approach. Similarly, time measurement, objective volume measurement, relative strengths of harmonics, these are all more accurately measured by machine. Again, it is important to remember that none of this may actually be important, and is often totally unrelated to music making. We _do_ pick up our horns to make music, and I think that is the major point that Steve is making (which I agree with). In fact, Steve's listening excercise might be far more useful than hours of spectrogram analysis.... Regards, Marc _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
