Tag Archives: recorded music

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A Lifetime of Listening

                                                wikipedia.org

When it comes to the life of the ear, we all have our stories.

Because life tends to send us in circles rather than straight lines, we can sometimes catch glimpses of our earlier selves many years later.  Look hard enough, and we see at least some recognizable landmarks that we revisited more often than we might think. It is those kinds of moments that can make it seem like a subject picks its author.

In my case, a pattern emerges early and turns into a persistent interest, a magnetic north, always in sight. A lifelong passion for sound began as one of many adolescent boys in the 1950s who built crystal sets and tried to get a scouting patches for knowing how to send and receive Morse code. It was clear even then that radio rivaled food and water as one of the essentials for sustenance. That first “cat’s whisker” receiver was one of many breadcrumbs dropped over the years, creating a meandering trail that rarely strayed from the peculiar geography of the auditory world. When I did wander off the path–as with a hand-me-down movie projector that rewarded my tinkering with frequent electrocutions–the message to stick to the machinery of sound was clearly received.

Words and music that found their way to the ear always held me in their grip, like the weekend nights spent listening to KOA radio’s live bands from Denver’s old Elitch Gardens. It had to be KOA, the 50,000-watt giant with a tower and building that stood majestic and completely alone out on the flat prairie. At night and under a cloudless sky, it was an Art Deco apparition of glowing amber windows next to its broadcast tower. Lore has it that the fountain in front was also cooling water that circulated through the bowels of the building to keep the huge transmitters from overheating. Fact was then stranger than fiction to know that the high voltage equipment inside came into its own at dusk, sending its clear-channel electrons deep into six other states.

If it wasn’t radio as a subject, it was a one-tube electronics kit purposefully miswired to become a nuisance transmitter sending the sound of 45s as well as a generous dose of interference to the rest the neighborhood.  Then there were  also a series of shortwave sets attached to a hundred feet of naked copper wire surreptitiously attached to a nearby utility pole. Hearing the BBC from London was one of the rewards.

This was the 1950s. New long-playing records joined the singles on a two-tone portable Symphonic phonograph. Ravel’s tonal fireworks and the Eastman School’s Frederick Fennell were favorites purloined from a modest household collection. A family friend and Fennell’s Mercury recording of Leroy Anderson’s music-Volume 2 combined to rouse an interest in the acoustic mayhem that was possible with drumming. Lessons and an assortment of school and private bands followed, producing a musician good enough to play in a statewide concert band, but one who also made more of a splash falling off a stage mid-performance than with mastery of the forty rudiments.

If I was just an ok percussionist, I was still swept along with the post-war generation that was completely captivated by the many riches of audio recording. Record browsing at Tower Records or Sam Goody was a Friday reward for surviving the week. Bargain label reissues of classical and jazz albums began to accumulate, as did recordings of European organs that puzzled college friends looking through my stash of vinyl for the latest from The Doors. Bach and Buxtehude learned to hang out on the shelf with Basie and Brubeck. It was all stuff that had to be heard, even if the playback equipment was a sorry collection from Radio Shack’s sale table.

I’ve written before about the “sound-centric” person.  The label fits, and represents more Americans than we might think.  Especially in these times, our easy access to recorded music is such a gift.

 

Keeping our Golden Ears

wave file wikipedia.orgSometimes the best that a concert-goer can hope for is a power failure that will require that we listen using only the sweet air between us and the performer.

It goes without saying that we’ve made great strides since the advent of electric recording in 1925.  Recordings, films, broadcasts and every other medium used to capture the nuances of voice and music have opened our ears to the world.  Even so, the rush into digital technologies for communicating at a distance have ironically taken us backward in the quest for lifelike sound.  In fact, in most cases the routine audio quality of cell-based communications, MP3 players, Bluetooth links, and streamed content from the web can’t match the better audio quality of analogue recordings made in the 1970s. The nadir was perhaps reached years ago when rockers deliberately added distortion as a “musical” component.

Try this simple test. Download an album from from an online music seller and compare it to its CD or vinyl counterpart.  You will find that you purchased something less than all the music. The technical reasons for the degradation of sound can be tricky to explain, but in general terms the villains usually include narrower bandwidths, lower sampling rates and higher levels of audio compression.  If you can’t immediately identify a caller on a mobile phone, the problem is primarily compression. The timbre of their voice has been stripted of its uniqueness. Most people with golden ears will also note that a compressed audio music file lacks a sense of “openness,” “detail,” and a kind of crystalline clarity that instruments like violins and cymbals require.  The MP3 format and its variants used on many phones and Ipods makes it possible to put a lot of music in compact digital files, but it performs this task by discarding musical overtones and other sonic information. The additional problem of a relatively low sampling rate is frequently what makes music sound “harsh” or “gritty” to golden ears: a common complaint about early CDs.

Add in what is now the standard setup for almost every kind of live music event—a heavily miked and amplified stage—and it becomes harder to remember the baseline of pure natural sound.  With the exception of classical music played indoors, few professional musicians in performance rely only on the natural acoustics of their instruments or voices. Everything is amplified, “augmented,” compressed and processed, most of it badly. Over my lifetime I’ve only attended one concert (jazz) where the musicians stopped and chewed out the sound engineer for the god-awful noise coming from over-driven, over-amplified stage speakers.  It should happen more often.

Even in intimate venues musicians and audiences seem to endure this tin ear treatment without protest. The best a listener with golden ears can hope for is that a power failure will intervene, requiring that we listen only via the sweet air between us and a performer.

In more specific terms, the problem is that a musician’s skill on a particular instrument is usually not matched by either the sound engineer’s, or their equipment.  The portable systems that are used are often riddled with deficiencies:  microphones and amplifiers that distort, cheap or damaged speakers that fail to keep things musical as the sound is projected from the stage, and high volume levels that overwhelm the delicate sensory cells of the inner ear that convert minute changes in air pressure into neural signals. It’s possible to experience more peace at the end of an airport runway than at some overamplified pop concerts.

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An early ad for London Record’s “Full Frequency Sound,” 1958.

This ubiquitous degrading of pure sound is mostly a function of making money by burdening performances with overlarge spaces.  The resulting need for heavy amplification often drives the electronics chain into “clipping,” the audio engineer’s term for the mess of sound that results when the chain is driven to produce more volume than it can accurately deliver.

The money motive also affects the sound of even good recordings, if the available bandwidth of a medium is too narrow. For example, most forms of streaming, and even newer forms of broadcasting such as satellite radio, all sacrifice high audio precision in the upper frequencies because of costs associated with using a wider channel. “Lossless” streaming is possible, sometimes available, but still rare.

The overall effect is that we have generally trained ourselves to have tin ears, accepting highly processed music that we supposedly left behind when “high fidelity” arrived in the late 1950s.

Kids are born with golden ears.  A good antidote to prevent turning them into tin is to encourage listening to unamplified music.  Having young children around is a good reason to dust off the acoustic guitar or tune the piano in the living room.  I also like Paul McCartney’s solution:  Get out the ukulele and sing.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu