ProSoundWeb: Most of us* spend our entire lives listening. From the moment we’re born, our ears are on – awake and asleep, we’re receiving audible input. We can close our eyes, but we can not close our ears (without mechanical intervention).
And yet, sound – and by extension, fidelity – is one of the most difficult things to talk about. We have no functional common vocabulary for discussing our audible experience, beyond saying something “sounds good” or “sounds bad.”
2 comments:
Sound is scary. I feel like I can never truly appreciate the nuances of it and what I am hearing ever. I obviously have my preferences for what I like and don’t like but sometimes I wonder if there is an objective right or wrong to what I’m hearing. There is music where the production quality of it is horrible but maybe its raw form is great or maybe the post makes it great but the live version of it is horrible because the person can’t perform but I feel like there is a room for a lot of different types of sound and everyone has their own niche. Because of this, I am so curious to know whether there is a right or wrong way to hear sound and interpret it. Is there a scientific way to judge whether something is good or bad? What determines if something is of good fidelity or vice versa or is everything just in the ear of the beholder.
This article has a solid point about the precision of our vocabulary around things (in this case specifically audio) that we care about and we want to be better. After taking ear training this semester (a class whose whole actual purpose is to get better at hearing slight differences in audio tracks) with the sound department, I realize just how many things can get changed within tracks and just saying it “sounds good” or it “sounds bad” is not particularly useful. Did it have high frequencies cut out or boosted? Did it have slight distortion? Was it attenuated during the sample? There are literally hundreds of these questions you can ask in in pursuing the best audio possible, you have to ask most of them. Sound is a fascinating medium and I think that we should give it the respect and care it deserves when talking about it. Precision is important and this article underscores that!
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