All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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Sound is a Product of Where it is Heard

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The makers of some of the marvelous devices that we purchase in order to hear great sound want us to believe that all the magic is because of their equipment.  But its not that simple. 

We usually think our audio gear is the primary sources of the sound environment we cherish.  Many of us can’t resist joining the never-ending chase for better amplifiers, speakers, virgin vinyl, digital-to-analogue converters and the like. And there is no shortage of companies and marketing experts who are happy to feed our search for audio perfection.  But the ostensible requirement for “good” or “high end” equipment ignores the huge effects that spaces have on the sounds that reach our ears.

For Dennis Foley, the wise and sometimes frustrated acoustical expert who offers short videos on YouTube, room size is the single most important variable in determining how well or badly something sounds. The folks that come to him for help in producing great sound usually want to talk about their $3000 turntables, $6000 amplifiers, or their rare English speakers–the same kinds used as monitors in recording studios. But he wants to talk about the usually inadequate amount of space where they will be used.  Roughly the ideal room for music should be at least 20 feet wide and 21 feet long, with a ceiling height of 11 feet.  And things only get better if there is even more volume.

Why does a room’s characteristics trump the relatively small qualitative differences between inexpensive and expensive audio equipment?  It gets complicated, but most rooms are simply too small to accurately reproduce a full range of auditory content. For starters, virtually every modest-sized space has a resonant frequency, meaning a particular sound pitch it “likes” to amplify. For example, I know a pleasant local restaurant with a great menu and only lit by candles.  All of its small rooms have a soft romantic glow: a perfect visual representation of what is meant by “fine dining.”  Yet this old inn actually sounds like a Chuck E Cheese on a Saturday afternoon. The problem with the restaurant is that its “intimate” small spaces contain a lot of hard surfaces or old-fashioned glass windows. They can’t help but reflect and amplify sounds at certain frequencies. In one especially regrettable room, the spaces love the lower frequencies of male voices—especially baritones. Give a male patron several glasses of wine and a seat in one of the few tables, and he can become the acoustic equivalent of a fire alarm.  Deafening. In slightly more technical terms, the room’s “mode” peaks at around 400 Hz. It loves sound in this range and is helped by very reflective glass. Your rooms have different modes.  You can hear them if you run a “sweep” of a tone-generating oscillator in them. The mode appears when a given frequency on the oscillator gets noticeably louder.

Many times the first mode in a room is in the bass range, where too much energy and long sound wavelengths have no place to go, so they just build into a mass of indistinct sound. A low note can produce a wave that is 20 feet long. The problem of this too-big-for-the-room energy is that it spills out of its path and makes a sonic mess.  A frequent result is the head-rattling boom of “one note” bass.  Our ears have been trained to accept these non-musical artifacts if dead thuds as the real deal.  But “muddy” base is not very musical.

In these situations, great equipment won’t help.  Something that will may seem to be counterintuitive.  Your music in a modest sized room will probably sound better if you listen at a more modest volume level.  As Foley would say, if you listen, a room will tell you what it can handle.

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I Wish I’d Been There

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Occasionally everything seems to come together in one place: prodigious talent, virtuoso performers, and a perfect program that is preserved in a great recording.

If only by default, most of us collect musical memories, usually through recordings, and only with a growing recognition that it would have been wonderful to have been present in the room. Some of us who are older may even obsess on what it would have been like to have been at Woodstock in 1969, or the Newport Jazz Festival a few years earlier, when Bob Dylan shocked the crowd by “going electric.”  Though there’s no recording, it would have also been fun to be on hand during the first performance in Paris of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, where the audience was so agitated by the avant-garde score that punches and airborne vegetables were thrown around the theater.

Most concerts usually go better, and some endure on extraordinary recordings.  Rolling Stone has catalogued their own list of the 50 most admired live concerts.  And all of us have a few of our own.  Every now and then everything comes seems to come together in one place, producing a kind of musical alchemy. In hindsight, we may envy the folks who were lucky to be present.  Ecstatic witnessing is the reward of a great performance.

I count myself lucky to have seen the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein play two full concertos at the Academy of Music with the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as a full slate of virtuoso soloists and orchestras around the country. Equally memorable were numerous chances to hear casino lounge acts by nameless but first-rate jazz players who performed in the 60s and 70s, all for the price of a drink.  Mine was always an underage stowaway’s Coke ordered from a seat in the back corner.  By the time I was 21, the lounges were mostly gone. My older self was too late to the party.

Perhaps the oddest form of witnessing where I would love to go back occurred during a lazy August afternoon, walking along the shady sidewalks of the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York.  The orchestra at the arts retreat was preparing for an evening concert that included Robert Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony (1851). The buoyant music from the open-sided amphitheater reflected off the Victorian buildings and drifted over Lake Chautauqua.  Direct and reflected sound in perfect balance; Schumann would have loved it.  The moment made me a convert. I still have the habit of searching for any new recording that recaptures the ambiance of that perfect afternoon.  And, of course, I’ll never find it, because the event is in my head as much as any recording.

I was too young to be present for a live performance that makes Rolling Stone’s list: a 1966 performance by Frank Sinatra at the legendary Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The main attraction in the 400 seat Copa Room was the 50-year old Sinatra in full control of his voice and perfect phrasing, but also the legendary Count Basie Band with Quincy Jones orchestrating and directing. This was the scene of the Rat-Pack haven immortalized in the original Oceans 11 film and countless other live recordings by Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. But on this night sound engineer Lowell Frank captured the band and Sinatra with stunning clarity.  It was easy to write about the lucky reclamation of performances like this in The Sonic Imperative.  For ‘sound centrics,’ musical moments are memories that stick.

In the recording the well-oiled audience can be heard, obviously loving every note. Some must have sensed that they were witnessing a performance never to be replicated again. More recently Jones recalled with complete accuracy that “Frank was at the height of his powers” singing with “the greatest band in the world.”