ProSoundWeb: How often do you listen to music? I don’t mean throw some tunes on in the car or play the radio in the background, I mean really listen; the kind of listening where you give the music your full attention, focusing on the qualities of individual sounds and noticing things which are not immediately obvious. That distant layered guitar chord; the faint timbale in the background; the different harmonies of the violins. The nuances of the reverbs, the tuning of the drums, the positioning of sounds within the stereo image.
8 comments:
This article is really interesting to read as a female designer who is interested in sound design/mixing. I have spent many of days just listening to different types of music. I spent an entire week just listening to Irish Flute music and learning about the different types (Aeir, Reel, etc). I love learning new things and seeing, or in this case, hearing things that bring about a whole new perspective on something. Becky Pell's advice was really good and something that I think all budding sound engineers should read. Not only does she talk about how to listen to music and dissect it, but she also talks about the actual engineering terms/filters that she found really useful to know in the industry. I also really love that this article is by an author who is a part of the SoundGirls organization that empowers young women to join the field of sound mixers, designers, and engineers within film and theater.
I have a friend who is so incredibly talented when it comes to playing instruments, and because of this, I always get a little nervous when showing him the songs I like. I remember the first time I played him my favorite song, which is a six minute long masterpiece full of breathtaking instrumental sections and lyrics that beautifully express life's most commonly felt feelings. Once the song was over, I awaited his response, expecting him to comment on the elements of the song I just mentioned. Instead, his only response was, "Huh. That's a weird way to incorporate a mandolin into a song. I probably wouldn't have done that". I have to admit I was crushed and a little appalled. Granted, I have listened to the song a so many times that I can (probably) tell you which instruments play at any given time. But I didn't start noticing those elements until I listened to it enough to declare it as my favorite song.
This experience did open my eyes (or ears? lol sorry) to those more subtle elements of songs, and now I try to pay attention to the instrumental components upon my first couple of listens. It's cool how the article suggested I try drawing where I hear the sounds. In my favorite song, which is called "Gone" by The Head and the Heart (absolute masterpiece), I would draw the violins at the lower right of my paper, the drums at the bottom center, and the piano at the top left. I have no clue why I visualize the sounds this way, but it's cool to think about nonetheless.
As someone who as loved music for his entire life, listening to a $5 pair of earbuds from Big Lots definitely did not do justice to anything that I was listening to. When I got my first set of good quality headphones, my music experience significantly changed. I grew to appreciate all the different elements that were included in the designing of the tracks and became open to different genres as well. Reading about the complex methodology behind creating these sounds is fascinating because it's a complicated science as it is an art. I've done a little bit of sound design for theatre before coming to CMU and reading this article made me more aware of different and interesting techniques and methods to use if I do work with sound again in the future. I found it very informative as someone who enjoys the technology aspects of design in any form.
As a music student for 7+ years of my life, I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to a wide range of classical/instrumental music, and am pretty good at picking out the different lines and instrumentations.
The ex-catholic, ex-music student, and current nerd in me loves to listen to Bach organ chorales as my study/focus music, but I also particularly love listening to different orchestral adaptations of them. Different composers/arrangers have taken the same piece written for organ, and distributed the music for a full orchestra. Every composer and conductor interprets the piece differently, and finding the nuances that I particularly like (or dislike) is a way for me to not focus on myself, and just open my ears.
I’ve found focused listening to be a form of meditation for me, but there’s a fine line between focusing on the music and getting lost in it. With good headphones/speakers especially, I can almost feel the music around me, and letting myself get washed away by particular songs can bring back such specific memories and feelings of a moment. Less technical than the article suggests, but still an important benefit of deep listening.
I don't even know where to begin with this article... it's so jam-packed full of incredible advice that I'm bookmarking it to my homepage right now!
To start off, I want to address the first part of the article where the writer talks about really listening to music, not just having it on in the background. I absolutely love doing that. I love really dissecting the layers I'm hearing and listening in on a specific sound. If I concentrate on the drum, I'll spend the whole song listening to the drums. If I l concentrate on the triangle, I'll spend the whole song listening to the triangle. Every other sound goes into the background, and I hear that part dead center. And once I spend time listening to each of those parts individually, I listen to the song again holistically and see how each of those elements brought in something to make the work so remarkable. It's really a mind-blowing process. I can't wait to try out the whole "drawing a picture of what I hear" idea. I can go on a whole rant about how sound isn't just something you hear and that it incorporates more senses than you'd think!
Another part of this article that I found really informative were the second and third pages where the writer talked about EQing. I'm an aspiring mixer and have spent lots of time in QLab with a song, just messing with the EQ and trying to understand how it works. I've never really had a teacher, so I've had a hard time really understanding why things are happening when I manipulate them. I can't wait to hopefully learn more about that in the next few years.
This article is interesting for multiple reasons, but the main thing I focused on is a personal connection I had when reading this article. When I was a little younger, my grandpa was diagnosed with alzheimer’s. He started to lose his memory very fast, but when we would put headphones on him with his favorite music, it all came back for just a few quick moments. The components of audio really have the power to bring out all of the emotions that lie deep inside us through all of the intricate mixing elements. With that being said, one of my favorite things to do is critically listen to music with my Beats on. You can hear all of the little intricacies like where the audio is panning, and what is going on in the background. It’s so interesting to me how detailed music starts to get and how the movement of the rhythm and audio itself all come together. It truly is a whole separate, complicated, and beautiful. Sound design is such an interesting and complex field, but I think that it really enhances anything that it is a part of.
I come from a largely music-based background. I have been involved with music in one form or another, creating or mixing, for the majority of my life and this article could not be any truer. The first part about intently listening to music to find things within it rather than just casually listening as your writing your comments for the week, goes a long way in helping you to understand and extract so much more from the music. This becomes extremely important when you are working with another artist on creating music. especially when one is working in a live event or show there is an active ebb and flow that happens in intensity and emotion, that if you are not intently engaged in the music you can loose a needed build and shift. It is something that stands out like a sore thumb when there is disunity in those performing and those mixing the sound, due in no small part to them not actually listening to the music.
The ability of focusing right onto a task is so important for theatrical technicians like us, for we are always changing our schedules, even if we are lucky enough to stick to our original time table, the venues and the shows are never predictable. The technique brought up by the article is really neat and flexible, almost every other discipline can apply to it. Personally I love the idea of starting easy and work your way up to the best. With achievable starting points such as practicing daily or making use of basic tools, we often get better understanding about the whole picture of what we are doing and what we are aiming for. The second befit of learning from scratch is that we get the long grinding time for polishing our fundamental skills and perfect our sense about it. The last paragraph also brought an important point of understand your job beforehand, which always gives you a head start and preventing total stuck in a project.
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