Category Archives: Reviews

Listening for Nuance

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Moderate levels of uncluttered sound reveal harmonics and timbres that are missed when we push a room and our ears beyond their limits.

We are lucky if we survive childhood with most of our hearing intact. Sporting events, concerts, cranked up earbuds and other explosions of sound all do a number on our fragile ears. On average, Americans listen to music on headphones at rates that can drift into a red zone of 94 to 105 dB At bustling New York restaurants it is common for a food reviewer to report that they cannot hear what their server is saying. These sound levels are akin to standing near the end of the runway of an American airport. Our current problem is that original equipment we were born with evolved to detect sound typical of a conversation than the roar inside a modern sports arena. Teens are especially attracted to the energy of noise, which I suspect stands in as a kind of token of independence.

Like other mammals, we were meant to aurally detect whispers, or the sounds of leaves underfoot, or the snap of a peapod when it is ready to yield the seeds inside. Nature decidedly did not evolve our hearing for the mayhem of a modern ballpark on a Saturday afternoon, or the output of a Fender 435-watt amplifier.

As as been said many times here, sonic overload in modern life is a problem. So is the assumption that listening is a throwaway skill. We don’t think we need to learn to listen, or to take steps to preserve our hearing. But most older adults who have clocked more than a few decades might tell you that an owner’s manual would have been a good idea. A life of listening at fortissimo involuntarily withers to pianissimo in later years, usually requiring electronic assists in middle age in order to still function in the culture.

                       Middle ear bones

Not only is hearing easily damaged by loud sounds, but the bones and tissues of the middle and inner ear typically don’t self-repair. In the face of a sound onslaught the best our hearing organs can do is slightly retard the bones of the middle, allowing for just a bit of protection from a sonic assault. Muscles connected to those tiny bones–the smallest in the body–can stretch to dampen loud noises to protect the fragile half-centimeter hair cells of the inner ear. But they are also easily overmatched by modern electrical and mechanical racket.

I started my brief stab as a school and college musician as a drummer, learning to use the musical artillery of a percussionist. But as I have aged, I’ve come to appreciate musical nuance, where moderate listening levels reveal inner sounds like timbres and recording room characteristics that are missed when we push hearing to its outer limits.  A good recording played at a moderate level will let you hear the wood of a string instrument, the three-octave spread of singer like Karen Carpenter, or the mellow warmth of Gary Burton’s vibraphone. We were meant to hear the quiet Westminster chimes of Big Ben quietly embedded in Ralph Vaughn William’s London Symphony, as well as the richness of Nathan East’s acoustic bass. Listen live to a pianist on a good piano and you may hear what recordings seldom catch. Even a single note triggers a range of audible overtones on the same instrument.

Overtones or “partials” give all acoustic instruments a wonderful complexity that the ear detects if not overwhelmed by other sounds.  Listen to the instruments in this clip: full and rich on their own, but also clearly in a space that functions as another instrument. There is some complex physics going on here that yields beautiful sounds.

It is also a plus to be able to sense the sound of a room. But it is heresy for most recording engineers. They want a “dry” space: acoustically the equivalent of listening to an unamplified solid-body electric guitar. No wonder musicians love the acoustic richness of most performance spaces with natural reverberation.

To be sure, very low listening levels can strip music of details and both ends of the sound spectrum. Unlike good audio equipment, our hearing is not stable and flat across all sound frequencies: a pattern sometimes known as the Fletcher-Munson effect. A listener has to find the sweet spot for hearing everything. The best experience is attained when auditory levels are less than Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” but more than the ubiquitous background music in a public space. At some point in the middle (75 dB, or what a voice or piano in a modest-sized room might produce) quieter overtones emerge, revealing a feast of detail at levels that the ear can handle.

The Glories of Making Music in the Same Space

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No one was going to tell Frank Sinatra to sing inside a tiny vocal isolation booth.

Many managers are not fans of working remotely. They often point out that there is something to learn about the advantages of meeting colleagues in real time and space. The same idea is present in the seemingly distant realm of music-making. Barbara Streisand’s Partners album (2014) famously created tracks pairing Streisand with different performers in sometimes distant studios. The audio engineering is clever, but it doesn’t seem to be an ideal way to make music. As a New York Times critic noted, “the instrumentation and the vocal tracks are so processed in pursuit of a high-gloss perfection that any sense of two people standing side by side and singing their hearts out is lost.”

Audio recording has advanced from the days when a small group of musicians would gather around a tiny, elevated platform and try to cast their music into a horn that collected enough sound to cut the vibrations into a wax disk. Recordings before 1920 were made in this awkward but honest way. No electronics were involved. No one phoned anything in. What is heard on those old 78s is the result of the use of a small acoustic space.

Obviously, the evolution of modern electronics changed all of that. Microphones, amplifiers and various gadgets appeared in the audio chain, sometimes adding over-dubs, reverberation and electronic tricks, partly turning recording into a science focused on the engineering of sound.

If the first wave of recording captured musicians in the same space and time, the second wave typically gave us a studio covered by a sea of microphones. But in the 1940s and 50s the goal of an audio engineer was to capture as much as you could, and usually on the musician’s terms. There were probably a few times when a record producer thought of suggesting that Frank Sinatra might get a better recording if he were isolated in a separate booth. But this was the Chairman of the Board, and he clearly wanted to feel the rumble of the Count Basie Band or the lushness of Nelson Riddle’s arrangements.

Even so, less established pop artists began to yield to their producers and engineers who were using newer tools like multi-track recorders and electronic sound “enhancement.”  In this third wave the final version of a song or album was an amalgam of live performance later altered by add-ons of strings, backup singers or new tracks with singers harmonizing with themselves. Performers accustomed to live performance were sometimes put off by this piecemeal approach, but soon it was the record rather than the live performance that was the final benchmark of a career.  Suddenly a live performance needed to use synthesizers and “backing tracks” to approximate the instruments and performers heard in the original recording. In simple terms, popular recorded music offered an altered soundscape that only gives the illusion of an event captured in one space and time.

Hearing the Room

If we want to hear an unaltered live performance, we have the records of some brave musicians, classical groups, and a smattering of jazz performances.  But the “all at once” philosophy in popular music was beginning to die out, leaving examples like Sinatra’s classic Songs for Swinging Lovers recorded in Capitol’s Studio A in 1956. As a photo from the session shows, Sinatra is in front of Nelson Riddle’s band and just a few feet from a Neumann U47 tube microphone. No one was going to tell Sinatra to sing away from the rest of the group.

In that still admired recording engineers had to work to keep the sound of the band from drowning out Sinatra’s voice. But everyone got the benefit of the energy that was evident in the performance. And it offers a tangible sense of space: an open-air ambiance contributed by a room that still exists in Hollywood.

Recording ambiance is part of what makes music in many forms so special. Here’s an obvious case: a clip of Richard McVey playing a well known British anthem within the 355-foot long Chichester Cathedral’s impressive nave. The organ and the open space work together to deliver a sonic gem.

Obviously, with recordings of popular music that are “built up” over time, producers, mastering engineers, and other various technicians now count themselves as co-producers of a performance. Among other things, the vocal isolation booth in a studio makes it possible to alter a singer’s wobbly performance with add-ons like reverberation or pitch correction, leaving the sounds produced by other studio musicians unaffected by this kind of vocal “sweetening.” And multi-track recording makes it easier to add a musician who was absent in the original session.

Virtuoso musicians like jazz drummer and songwriter Nate Smith still prefer what happens in real time with musicians in the same room. They may try a few versions of a piece, but Smith insists that his recordings let a listener experience all but not more than what he and his bandmates heard together in the studio.

Ironically, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has made the same point about wanting employees back in the office. To be sure, it is harder on the employees, but the best collaboration happens when there is direct and unmediated access to what others are doing.