the science of sound
- March 11th, 2009
- Posted in Arts & Literature . Science
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acoustics is the study and science of sound. unfortunately it is a dying science these days with the explosion of digital media. more and more people are readily accepting shitty quality of sound to enjoy their listening. how people enjoy music using their cellphones as a music player is beyond me. ipods and other players are just as much to blame as digital audio files are compressed into such a small file that all good quality audio is sucked right out of it. an audio cd for example has an average track of five minutes which uncompressed goes anywhere from 50 to 100 MB. an mp3 of the same track would be an average of 5 mb. there’s something wrong with that picture.
now it seems like things are getting worse, as people seem to think that the decompression of the audio on the fly (and the “noise” that comes with it) is part of the actual track and they seem to prefer the screechy scratchy sounds in mp3′s.
personally, i don’t feel audiophiles have much to be worried about as vinyl and cd’s aren’t gonna disappear anywhere in the near future, but they are definitely getting harder to find and unfortune as it is, we pay more for shitty sounding music and less for good sounding music.
“Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. Berger says that young people seemed to prefer ‘sizzle sounds’ that MP3s bring to music because it is a sound they are familiar with. ‘The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),’ writes Berger. ‘To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 — particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.’ Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception of the sound, particularly when it’s so obviously and immediately shared by others. ‘All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It’s mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won’t be obvious to them.”
I’m not sure it’s worth drawing a parallel between acoustics as a science and the general perception of what constitutes a “good” sound. ;)
Distortion due to the loudness war (excessive compression) has been going on with the CD format a long time before MP3z came on the scene, and that was done at the mixing level – ie. it was a preference. It didn’t have other beneficial side effects like maximizing storage capacity and minimizing download bandwidth, for example. The context of the music is a good point, but rather than being sociological as suggested I think it’s a real perception. People usually listen to music in their noisy cars, on public transit, while exercising, etc. and not in a relaxing contemplative setting. The desire for a louder sound is driven by the fact that they want to focus on the main vocals, and a handful of loud rhythms and melodies, rather than listening to the tone and complexity of the music. It’s quite possible that the sizzle is just lost in the sea of background noise for most listeners.
Personally I now buy mp3z instead of vinyl, but only at 320kbps. The biggest problem with vinyl is that it’s expensive. I’m willing to allow some low-volume compression artifacts at high frequencies in my playback for the same reason – I don’t have a $1000 pair of sennheiser hd 800′s laying around to discern the difference between it and FLAC, for example.
Maybe the ambivalence towards sizzle has some sort of psychological basis though… it could be that the brain conditions itself to expect this “background instrument” and when it doesn’t hear it there is a failure to get properly excited about the music. Kind of like a reverse tinnitus, if you will.
Hugh