[HN Gopher] Undisembodying Recorded Music
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Undisembodying Recorded Music
Author : ingve
Score : 21 points
Date : 2021-05-11 07:31 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.charlespetzold.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.charlespetzold.com)
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I couldn't agree more with him.
|
| For years I was all about live recordings of music, but with
| youtube there's a scad of amazing videos of music being played.
| It makes all the difference in the world and I don't care that
| the audio quality is worse. I haven't listened to music that
| wasn't a video recording of a live performance for some time.
|
| One implication might be heavy use of youtube_dl since the
| copyright elves are going to continue to bring their attention to
| the matter.
| coldpie wrote:
| I have been learning classical guitar lately, and in looking for
| modern composers I discovered Andrew York (no small name, but I
| hadn't heard of him before). I watched/listened to his full
| unedited 1991 performance[1] and it was a really captivating
| experience, especially as a new student to the instrument. He
| tunes the instrument on-stage, including changing tunings
| entirely; discusses some of the pieces; the long pauses between
| pieces are captured. All stuff Mr Petzold describes. Definitely a
| different experience from listening to an album, and I look
| forward to doing more of it.
|
| As a complete aside, Petzold's "Code" book is one of the best
| computing books I've ever read, and totally informed my career
| after I read it in high school.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF5Pc6YjRqA
| flobosg wrote:
| I would like to mention the hate5six project, hosting thousands
| of live performance videos mostly from hardcore punk bands:
| https://hate5six.com/
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| A decade ago, I used to go to a local jazz club, ask the
| performers if they are ok with me recording their performance for
| my personal use, and if they were ok, I took out my trusty Zoom
| H4n, put it on a stand, and recorded away. On a good day, I could
| use an additional pair of Samson C1 mics as well.
|
| The musicians I met there were a friendly bunch, and usually were
| totally ok, provided I sent them a copy, too.
|
| I cherish these recordings a lot to this day. Not only because I
| was 10 years younger back then, although that too, but also
| because the performance sounded more authentic precisely because
| it wasn't overproduced, thoroughly compressed, denoised, and
| equalized to hell. There are people talking in the background,
| the floor boards may squeak sometimes, and it's a very immersive
| experience.
|
| I like hearing the air hissing quietly into the microphones. When
| it's not there, the sound is uncanny. When it's there but there's
| a lot of editing, you can hear it change, and that's uncanny too.
| When it had been there and got subsequently removed, often a
| noticeable portion of "signal" is removed too, and the sound
| becomes very "artificial".
|
| Sometimes I like a good studio recording, too. It's just that I
| like it for different things: mostly it's to hear what the
| musicians really intended to convey, provided, of course, that
| the album had been mastered to their preferences.
| sxp wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about adding spatial audio
| processing [1] to recorded music. One of the reasons recorded
| music is uncanny is that the act of listening to something with
| stereo channels piped directly into your ears is vastly different
| than listening to the same music in a room as it is affected by
| the room's dynamics.
|
| There is a lot of work being done in VR research labs to simulate
| realistic audio by using the correct transfer function when
| playing the audio track. If done properly, listening to
| prerecorded audio of a concert would be indistinguishable from a
| live concert. But doing it correctly requires dynamically
| adapting the audio stream for the user's head & ear shape and ear
| position with respect to the audio source.
|
| Synthetic spatial audio that passes a Turing test has been done
| in the lab but we probably won't see it in consumer devices for a
| few more years. VR headsets and Airpods are slowly getting there,
| but they don't simulate the user's ears.
|
| [1] https://smus.com/spatial-audio-web-vr/
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| At some point in the 80's or 90's I read a book by someone who
| was at AT&T and into simulating room dynamics.
|
| One thing I remember is that, according to him, a large amount
| of classical music sounds much better when the transfer
| function approximates a relatively tall, narrow room (like a
| cathedral) than when it approximates a relatively short, wide
| room (like a modern concert hall).
|
| (note that construction spans, lighting, and ventilation, all
| conspire to make historical rooms taller and narrower than our
| typical rooms)
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Well I don't know what the writer's exact reasoning is, but
| there are few factors for why larger rooms are favorable:
|
| 1) Room modes. Small rooms are far more destructive because
| they feature hot-spots where the sound waves (especially the
| low end) are either cancelled out or reinforced in a way that
| makes them too loud. Large ceilings and lots of the depth to
| the room give the low frequencies space to propagate
| completely and a more even frequency response that isn't
| lumpy or lacking when you stand in certain parts of the room.
|
| 2) Reverberation. Pretty obvious, but the average length of
| the echoes/reverberant tail increase as the room gets bigger.
| This is gives an ambient quality to the sound that is well
| suited to orchestral ensembles. You could probably argue that
| the history of orchestral composition grew in tandem with
| this quality and informed the choices that were made or play
| best with the qualities of a room large enough to house an
| orchestra and audience. That said, highly percussive music
| might be muddied or hard to articulate cleanly if it's
| fighting against a massive reverb tail in a cathedral.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > listening to prerecorded audio of a concert would be
| indistinguishable from a live concert
|
| It seems to me this would be really dependent on the type of
| music and the size of the venue.
|
| In a large percentage of the bigger shows I've been to, the
| sound was honestly pretty awful. That's not really what I was
| there for. I was there to see what the artist(s) could do
| unedited in real time, in person, and to be (somewhat)
| physically near them when it happened. It's a different
| skillset from what they do in recordings.
| diydsp wrote:
| Having gone through a wave of bedroom recording, phone
| performances(youtube etc.), modular synths, and finally pandemic,
| we are overdue for a folk/indie/live music wave.
|
| This doesn't contradict Petzold's glee for yt, bc his yt is a
| yearning for less edited performances.
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