But what do we know about how the brain and ears work together to create the auditory response, and how can we make use of it in our mixes?
Friday, October 05, 2018
Keeping It Real: Psychoacoustics In IEM Mixing
But what do we know about how the brain and ears work together to create the auditory response, and how can we make use of it in our mixes?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
I didn’t know that our brains and our ears can do so much with so little. It’s fascinating how they can both fill in the gaps of missing information and also get so overwhelmed and confused by too much similar information (auditory masking effects). I honestly just thought that you can’t hear a friend on a train platform because the train is so much louder, it never occured to me that it also had to do with the sound frequencies being so similar that your friend’s words are engulfed by the train’s new auditory input. Since our brains can put together sounds given harmonics, with or without the root chord, I wonder how far one could push it to the point where you lose it completely. Like if you were to just bring out the extreme highs and lows of the characteristic ‘boom’ and ‘thwack,’ would you still get the full presence of the drum kit? How many frequencies could you pull out before the brain can no longer figure out what’s happening?
Constantly the weird tricks of the body amaze me. I always love hearing about the relationship our brain has with our bodies. I would like to personally test this out as an experiment myself, and hear how far apart frequencies need to be to distinguish them better. Sometimes the direct route isn't always the better one, and knowing I have to cut out frequencies when I’m mixing was one of the weirdest things to learn when I was younger. A large part of sound engineer’s job is about manipulating the listener, and going about it the scientific route is fascinating, I will try to keep up to date with this article and its tips on mixing.
Recently I have been learning from a cognitive neuropsychology perspective about the intricacies of the way we process both visual and audio information, and it is amazing to see this work linked to theatre. I think it is absolutely fascinating the way sound physically and electrically travels through our brains, as well as how our brains make sense of that signal. There are many similarities between visual and auditory processing, as it is mentioned in this article that we do not actually need all of the pieces to make sense of the puzzle, so to speak, which is very similar to the concept of both the blind spot as well as object completion tasks which neurotypical humans are able to complete with little to no difficulty. I lov sing scientific research and work linked to theatre, and I would love to see more on how the way we process information affects the theatre-going experience.
This article is fascinating. My knowledge of audio is mostly limited to plug-and-play, basic Qlab level stuff. I’ve heard audio techs talk about “shaping the sound” for various situations, particularly in event production, and I’ve seen band members leaving the stage to scold (or, on rare occasion, fire) the people mixing their monitors, but I don’t have any real grasp of what the issues are or how audio techs shape what I imagine as invisible wiggles. I certainly had no idea about psychoacoustics, though I suppose it makes sense on an experiential level. I’ve noticed that I have a hard time hearing and understanding speech in certain environments--I now understand that that is due to failed frequency resolution. Furthermore, on those occasions when it takes me a few seconds before I am able to recognize what is being said, it is likely because my brain hasn’t finished filling in the gaps of what my ears haven’t been able to process.
This is fascinating. I am always interested in learning more about how our brains process sensory input. What seems the most interesting to me in this article, is how we perceive different frequencies of sound in different ways, and the ways different frequencies interact with each other and our perceptions. For example, the frequency-cancelling phenomenon, where if there are two frequencies which are similar enough, the more intense one will block out the other one, makes sense due to the structure of the ear. Inside the inner ear, there are tiny little hairs which are actually the nerve endings which detect the vibrations that we call sound. Each of these little hairs resonates to a different speicific frequency in a gradient. which means that if these hairs are resonating with a loud sound of a specific frequency, that loud sound will overtake the less loud sound because the hairs are busy with the louder one. This kind of interference reminds me in a way of the process of lateral inhibition within the photoreceptors of the eye. This process makes it so that excited photoreceptors actually send inhibiting signals to their neighboouring photoreceptors. This is one of the reasons humans are able to perceive the differences between light and dark so easily. the phenomenon of lateral inhibition makes it so that at the border between light and dark colors, the receptors on the light side are being less inhibited and therefore it seems brighter, and the receptors on the dark side are being more inhibited, making the boundary area look darker. This emphasizes the interfaces around light and dark colors.
This article reminds me of the article I commented on about the Miller Art Gallery opening exhibit. The different sequences and acts that our brains do is crazy but fascinating at the same time. It reminds me going to a restaurant and seeing a scrambled sentence game on the kids menu, and being able to read every word. The repetition of seeing these words in everyday life made it look like I was looking at the word, even though one or two letters were random. Using music as an example in the article made it so much easier to relate to. The human connection with sounds is so cool to read about. As someone who loves music, I can clearly see the relationship with it and human emotion. Just the sound can sway your mood, make your body move, and change your outlook on any given situation. Even the emotion that comes from the musical artists creates a really cool human connection with the listener because there is something to relate to.
This is a really cool article. Psychoaccoustics has interested me for several years, but most sound programs have little or no material covered on the subject. I’ve always found this strange, considering the job of the sound designer is ultimately to use sound to create a feeling or idea in the audience. Whether that is through standard artistic principles like repetition and contrast or through the relatively unique associative and esthetic properties of sound and music, it seems like a solid understanding of how people perceive and feel about sounds would be more valued and more thouroughly taught. All this to say that this article contains several tips and tricks that might be useful in monitor mixing but also in broader audio contexts, and it presents them in a clear and precise manner. It is by no means an exhaustive or even deep dive into how qualities of sound affect their perception, but it’s a good intro to paychoaccoustics.
I don’t have too much knowledge in sound, how it works within us and in the theatre. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I decided to read Becky Pell’s article, Keeping it Real: Psychoacoustics In IEM Mixing. Though I lack knowledge in sound, I have had interests in human behavior and the how and why we responded the way we do. The article’s subject surrounds this, Becky poses the question “What do we know about how the brain and ears work together to create the auditory response, and how can we make use of it in our mixes?”. She points out that hearing is not just a mechanical phenomenon. Hearing is the result of our brains working alongside our ears translating those pressure waves into information, letting us know where the sounds is coming from, “how close it is, whether it’s stationary or moving, how much attention to give it and whether to be alarmed” or not. Understanding how sound affects us psychologically we can find more ways to ingross the audience into an experience. She gives examples to show how strong of a correlation sounds has with our brain, such as studies that “have shown that memories can be unlocked in people with severe brain damage and dementia patients by playing music they’ve loved throughout their lives. This article is another example in the benefits of knowing why and not just the resultant how. Fundamental explanations are important when creating with any medium. Especially why it creates emotional results in us.
Post a Comment