I apologize if people took offense. But the issue is serious. It is surely acceptable if people want to make recordings that do not sound like what was really there. This does not interest me personally all that much, but to each his own artistically. But surely no one would argue that this freedom to make recordings sound as one wishes relieves the field of audio of the obligation to know how one woudl reproduce in the best way possible the thing that was really there if one wanted to .
Variations from reality ought surely to be based on knowing how to reproduce the reality first and then introducing the variations. One does not bend pitches for artistic effect until one is able to play in tune, so to speak. If people want to treat recording as a pure art form where one simply judges the results on aesthetic grounds. it would be hard to say that was wrong. But it surely takes recording out of the realm of science. To my mind, offensive or no, it remains startling to me that there is no recorded demo of how various stereo mike techniques reproduce the sound of a pink noise source at various spots around the recording stage, for example. Surely people might want to know whether the mike technique was changing the perceived frequency response of sources depending on where the sources were? How can people NOT want to know this? And yet, while one can do theoretical calculations, practical demonstrations are hard to find. In fact, I am unaware of anywhere where such an experiment has been recorded and provided to the public. This is just one of many experiments that would be easy enough to do. I agree with EC that a complete analysis of the relationship between recording and musical sound would be a tremendous task, perhaps one that is not even well defined. But simple things like how does pink noise response change with respect to position are not hard to analyze at all. One just needs to do it. This is how science works. One works out simple cases first. The fact that no one knows if there are infinitely many primes pairs with difference 2(eg 17 and 19) does not make it irrelevant to know that there are infinitely many primes. One answers simple questions first. Except in audio, where no simple question ever seems to get definitively answered and every almost discussion turns into mush by means of enlarging the complexity of the situation to the point that there are so many variables that no analysis is possible without wild difficulties, if at all. Personally, I would just like to know which mike technique does what to the tonal character of sources at different locations around the recording stage. If you don't care, you don't care. But I wish I had a disc where I could listen and find out. I find it hard to believe that other people are not interested in this. Science works like that:one step at a time. Assuming that people are interested in science. Years ago I decided to learn the piano(I am a violinist!) just to see how it would go, by learning the Rachmaninoff 3rd piano concerto --a measure at a time. As you can imagine I did not get very far! (the first statement of the theme went ok but soon, no soap). Of course this was a joke! I knew from experience of learning to play the violin that one learns the basics step by step and builds up to the complex pieces over a long time. Audio seems to be missing a lot of the basics. Robert PS There is a good bit of this sort of thing about LOCALIZATION. But not so much about timbre. _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
