Do Members use Live Music as a Reference

[caesar]

Good question, Caesar. My short, curt, answer is that the former word is an adjective and the latter word is a noun.

More seriously, in these contexts, I think that "natural" and "realistic" can be interchanged, as in my above sentence, "The non audiophile who attends acoustic concerts, or has a child taking piano lessons, knows what a piano sounds like and he will know how to answer the question of whether or not a stereo sounds natural (or realistic)". I do not think one term is better or worse than the other, but they do have slightly different meanings to me.

To me "natural" implies in this audio descriptor context, that something sounds believable, convincing and reminds one of the way the real thing or instrument sounds. It does not sound mechanical, or artificial, but rather of nature, organic, like in life. There are degrees, and some systems sound more natural than others. Some don't sound natural at all and utterly fail and creating a believable or convincing illusion or music being played in front of us. I do not mean to imply that an audio system sounds "real", that is, indistinguishable from the real thing, instrument, or reality. Our audio systems produce a man made sound, so we know it is not a real piano playing in the room in front of us, but to me, if it sounds natural, the system has the ability to suspend my disbelief just enough to sound similar to the way I remember a piano sounding while being played in a room.

I think the word "realism", that Amir used above, can indeed be the way one describes his goal in this hobby, as in "My goal is to assemble a system which can convey a sense of "realism" to the listener. I find that perfectly acceptable, but realize that some audiophiles do not have that goal and have other ways to describe what they are trying to do. I don't really know what Amir means when he uses the term.

Thanks, Peter. I guess we are back to Platonism.

Just teasing! fun thread!

 

[PeterA]

Peter, I don't mean above in the sense that someone is constantly comparing the 2 experiences. But I mean it in the sense that everyone has experience with "real" and "live", and when they judge one system to be more "realistic" or "better", they are tapping into that knowledge.

Yes, and I think that is why Ack wrote that this is all so obvious. I tried to make the poll question simple, but I think it ended up being too vague because there have been different interpretations of what I meant by writing "a" reference. Members, me included, are arguing the extremes, and perhaps reading it too literally. It is hard to imagine that one actually blocks out his memory of having heard what live music sounds like when he evaluates his system. My intent was just to find out how many of us actively seek out live music and then use our memories of those experiences to help us, in part, to make decisions about our systems.

I know my group of Boston area audio friends all love to attend live acoustic concerts. Those experiences then inform them of particular characteristics of the sounds of their systems. We are fortunate to live in an area where there is so much good music available. I have also visited a serious audiophile who lives in a somewhat remote area who just doesn't have the opportunity to hear many acoustic music performances. He told me he wishes he had. And still others just don't have the interest. That is fine too.

 

[853guy]

Although we obviously come from different fields, my background were once the humanities, what I wrote in a post here some time ago, certainly touches upon the essence of what you point out to us.
At the same time, I am glad that you put the term music in your second last paragraph in invered commas. Because at that point where quantitative data come in contact with qualitative value systems, things start to get annoyingly but also more often not refreshingly complicated: I know quite a number of people for whom Sting is not music but noise, whereas I also know of a mall here in Europe, were loitering youths were driven off by Mozart. To them Mozart was noise. If pressed, I would think, that both parties at the end would agree, that it was music of some sort, but that they did not like it. So I am wondering, if your basically excellent idea to use FMRI scanning to adjudge the fidelity of our systems would really be a solution to our problems. I have not read the paper you have based your thoughts on, but I would suspect, that education into, immersion into whatever kind of music from early years on, would not only leave traces in our brains functionality as to how we experience music, but also how we differentiate between what we percieve as music or as noise. Wonder if any research has been done here already concerning this quantitative/qualitative nexus.

Hi Detlof,

I did three years of sociology and psychology as a double-major but dropped out and worked in a record store while playing in a band and attempting to get signed. (The band imploded just as we got some major label interest, but I did accrue a massive music collection, so it worked out well.)

You’re right of course. ‘Music of some sort’ is helpful when discussing the sort of socio-cultural aspects of music consumption and its attendant preferences. But my suggestion for the continued use of FMRI scanning is not so much to work out the fidelity of our systems per se, but firstly to A) avoid subject reportage which is inherently problematic and vulnerable to bias (i.e., “I said X but thought Y” and/or “I thought X but said Y”); and B) use it to compare and contrast brain response to the same piece of music on two different systems.

This is very much still a nascent area of research, so I’m not holding my breath for it to happen anytime soon. But you never know.

As to how we differentiate between music and non-music, that's been investigated by Sam Norman-Haignere, Nancy G. Kanwisher, Josh H. McDermott in their research paper "Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition".

Link here: http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract...ieve/pii/S0896627315010715?showall=true&cc=y=

 

[caesar]

Yes, and I think that is why Ack wrote that this is all so obvious. I tried to make the poll question simple, but I think it ended up being too vague because there have been different interpretations of what I meant by writing "a" reference. Members, me included, are arguing the extremes, and perhaps reading it too literally. It is hard to imagine that one actually blocks out his memory of having heard what live music sounds like when he evaluates his system. My intent was just to find out how many of us actively seek out live music and then use our memories of those experiences to help us, in part, to make decisions about our systems.

I know my group of Boston area audio friends all love to attend live acoustic concerts. Those experiences then inform them of particular characteristics of the sounds of their systems. We are fortunate to live in an area where there is so much good music available. I have also visited a serious audiophile who lives in a somewhat remote area who just doesn't have the opportunity to hear many acoustic music performances. He told me he wishes he had. And still others just don't have the interest. That is fine too.

Thanks, Peter. Obviously it's a complex topic based on the interpretations.

An additional complexity is guys like Harry Pearson, and now Valin, market themselves as the all-knowing-ones who can proclaim a system as "most real".

 

[Detlof]

Thanks, Peter. I guess we are back to Platonism.

Just teasing! fun thread!

Lol, yes Caesar, of course we are, but now following your tease, let's progress to Sophism:
Sadly the terms realistic and natural are not synonymous, carry different meanings. To my mind realistic means not real, but close to it, but natural is simply natural and close to nothing, it is of the quality of unadulterated nature, is naturalness. So, not wanting to be chained to Plato's cave, I would say, that if I have had enough wine and the atmospheric pressured is right, that my stereo sounds realistic, close to what I phantasise as real. But I need to be stone drunk to say that my machines sound natural.

 

[RogerD]

Now that Wilson Audio has come out with their Time Domain technology I think it will be easier for people that have heard the speaker to realise the importance that this technology has to audiophiles as far as realism. TDC crosses the threshold of a more accurate and realistic portrayal of the recorded event. In great recordings TDC can reproduce the recording and venue,but it still is a recording,although the illusion can put you closer to the live event than thought possible. Does listening to live music help...yes of course. Is it a marker for system performance...yes. Is it possible to produce the live sound...no,but the illusion of the live event can be reproduced depending on the playback system used to a satisfying degree. Let's hope technology continues to bring us closer to the music in larger increments.

 

[Detlof]

Hi Detlof,

I did three years of sociology and psychology as a double-major but dropped out and worked in a record store while playing in a band and attempting to get signed. (The band imploded just as we got some major label interest, but I did accrue a massive music collection, so it worked out well.)

You’re right of course. ‘Music of some sort’ is helpful when discussing the sort of socio-cultural aspects of music consumption and its attendant preferences. But my suggestion for the continued use of FMRI scanning is not so much to work out the fidelity of our systems per se, but firstly to A) avoid subject reportage which is inherently problematic and vulnerable to bias (i.e., “I said X but thought Y” and/or “I thought X but said Y”); and B) use it to compare and contrast brain response to the same piece of music on two different systems.

This is very much still a nascent area of research, so I’m not holding my breath for it to happen anytime soon. But you never know.

As to how we differentiate between music and non-music, that's been investigated by Sam Norman-Haignere, Nancy G. Kanwisher, Josh H. McDermott in their research paper "Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition".

Link here: http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract...ieve/pii/S0896627315010715?showall=true&cc=y=

Thank you 853 for your response. Now I understand that point better and would certainly second it. Contrasting brain response to a defined piece of music coming from different systems would indeed be a fascinating venture. Thanks also for your link. Your input has put some life into my old brain!

 

[NorthStar]

To me everyday life is a reference. It doesn't even require one to be more than just a little bit mindful. We are visual by nature but just paying attention once in a while builds up an aural map (yes there is such a thing and is the subject of ongoing neuro science) that is formed in all people. Animals too for that matter. Successful reproduction for me is a presentation that hews closely to my own collective experiences. Call it sounding natural if the sounds are sounds of nature, call it realistic if it fits in with what I've come to expect the versions of the real thing sounds like.

I'd like to make one little distinction here that is rarely brought up. Recorded music is an art form in itself. In the majority of cases, recorded music and its subsequent playback is not meant to be an exact replica of a particular event in time. Rather it is about creating virtual event behind which is a vision of a final product meant to bring pleasure by eliciting various emotional responses. A composer writes a story, the artists interpret that story and engineers deliver that story. An analogy would be the a screenwriter writing a story, a director and his actors bringing the story from page to action and the cinematographer and editor giving the best color and pace. The best recordings are collaborative processes made up of a string of human decisions. The big question is, can we relate to it all? What would entail that? I posit that to do this the whole package must do two basic things, first is that it must inspire enough interest for us to actually pay attention and the second is that for the story to comes across there needs to be a sonic correlation with what one might expect to hear in everyday life. It doesn't need to be a replica, it just needs to be identifiable in both sonics and in message content. The only exception I can think of is experimental music the purpose of which is more to push paradigms outwards as opposed to music meant to fit within a preexisting one.

So yes, while I do use live music as one of my references particularly in terms of dynamics and harmonics, my goal is never to try simulate a live event but rather to be able to put myself within an event. Curiously enough, this works for me in two curious ways. First this mental approach allows me more time to enjoy because it puts me in a more relaxed, receptive state. The second is that when in this state of mind, the question between live and contrived becomes moot and academic. Life like, realistic, natural, whatever adjective one would like to use, is easier to do than live and for me lifelike immersion is definitely enough.

Now we're on the same wavelength. Every single day, every little sound, every whisper, every tune playing, every breath, every air movement/displacement, every heartbeat, every single adjustment/fine tuning, every pair of ears location, every flapping of the wings, the leaves falling down, the wind blowing, the children playing, the birds singing, every single moment in space is a reference. It is never constant, it always live with everything in it.

A sound system playing a music recording is our reference.
What we do with it depends of our preference.
And when in sync with the soul of a man/woman it becomes a reverence.

What we love is us, music live, and reproduced...the sound of a piano. We can bring a CD recording of a solo piano to our friend's home, or the album if she has a turntable, or we can bring the piano itself and play it ourselves if we know how to play it. If not we can bring the pianist along with it. ...In the nude, the piano, not the pianist...unamplified...in the raw, untouched, unwired, unplugged, like that cello player earlier posted by Peter in that beautiful marble decor. That, is a reference.

 

[Detlof]

Now we're on the same wavelength. Every single day, every little sound, every whisper, every tune playing, every breath, every air movement/displacement, every heartbeat, every single adjustment/fine tuning, every pair of ears location, every flapping of the wings, the leaves falling down, the wind blowing, the children playing, the birds singing, every single moment in space is a reference. It is never constant, it always live with everything in it.

A sound system playing a music recording is our reference.
What we do with it depends of our preference.
And when in sync with the soul of a man/woman it becomes a reverence.

Beautiful! Thank you.

 

[RayDunzl]

Had the poll question been "Do members use Live Sound as a reference", my answer would have been "yes" instead of "no".

Bang on a piano. Listen to the sounds it makes. Is it music? Not necessarily. Could it provide a reference for piano reproduction? Does for me.

Twang a banjo, or guitar, or make some noises on a clarinet, flute, trombone. This informs the ear/brain about sound, which is what an audio system produces. It doesn't make music. Music resides on a different plane.

"What is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn't become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music. Most people can't deal with that abstraction -- or don't want to." - FZ

I have an ancient 9 volt transistor pocket radio. Does it produce sound accurate to the source? No. Does it convey music? It can, when it isn't conveying talk or commercial interruptions.

 

[NorthStar]

Now that Wilson Audio has come out with their Time Domain technology I think it will be easier for people that have heard the speaker to realise the importance that this technology has to audiophiles as far as realism. TDC crosses the threshold of a more accurate and realistic portrayal of the recorded event. In great recordings TDC can reproduce the recording and venue,but it still is a recording,although the illusion can put you closer to the live event than thought possible. Does listening to live music help...yes of course. Is it a marker for system performance...yes. Is it possible to produce the live sound...no,but the illusion of the live event can be reproduced depending on the playback system used to a satisfying degree. Let's hope technology continues to bring us closer to the music in larger increments.

Roger, I'm interested to find more on this:

_______

? http://www.tonmeister.ca/wordpress/2016/01/09/beolab-90-at-ces-2016/
? http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?18641-B-amp-O-Beolab-90

 

[NorthStar]

Beautiful! Thank you.

I wanted to play a nice tune, from my alto flute, but short of that I just typed few words that came in my brain. :b
_______

I checked for Mike's input (Lavigne) here in this thread; but he hasn't posted...yet.

 

[DaveC]

There is a high end audio dealership in the Boston area called "Natural Sound". It's a good name.

There's also a distribution group using that name... edit: 853 beat me to it!

 

[jkeny]

To me everyday life is a reference. It doesn't even require one to be more than just a little bit mindful. We are visual by nature but just paying attention once in a while builds up an aural map (yes there is such a thing and is the subject of ongoing neuro science) that is formed in all people. Animals too for that matter. Successful reproduction for me is a presentation that hews closely to my own collective experiences. Call it sounding natural if the sounds are sounds of nature, call it realistic if it fits in with what I've come to expect the versions of the real thing sounds like.

I'd like to make one little distinction here that is rarely brought up. Recorded music is an art form in itself. In the majority of cases, recorded music and its subsequent playback is not meant to be an exact replica of a particular event in time. Rather it is about creating virtual event behind which is a vision of a final product meant to bring pleasure by eliciting various emotional responses. A composer writes a story, the artists interpret that story and engineers deliver that story. An analogy would be the a screenwriter writing a story, a director and his actors bringing the story from page to action and the cinematographer and editor giving the best color and pace. The best recordings are collaborative processes made up of a string of human decisions. The big question is, can we relate to it all? What would entail that? I posit that to do this the whole package must do two basic things, first is that it must inspire enough interest for us to actually pay attention and the second is that for the story to comes across there needs to be a sonic correlation with what one might expect to hear in everyday life. It doesn't need to be a replica, it just needs to be identifiable in both sonics and in message content. The only exception I can think of is experimental music the purpose of which is more to push paradigms outwards as opposed to music meant to fit within a preexisting one.

So yes, while I do use live music as one of my references particularly in terms of dynamics and harmonics, my goal is never to try simulate a live event but rather to be able to put myself within an event. Curiously enough, this works for me in two curious ways. First this mental approach allows me more time to enjoy because it puts me in a more relaxed, receptive state. The second is that when in this state of mind, the question between live and contrived becomes moot and academic. Life like, realistic, natural, whatever adjective one would like to use, is easier to do than live and for me lifelike immersion is definitely enough.

Yes, Jack, agree completely
Here's my take on the discussion
There are a couple of different levels to realism in sonics that you have teased out. The first is the realistic auditory representation of recognisable auditory objects - in other words we do judge a the sound of an acoustic guitar against a 'stored model' that we all have internalised of an acoustic guitar. If there is some anomalies in this presentation then 'unrealism' enters our consciousness. I say model but it is probably a much more loosely defined statistical spectral map of what constitutes an acoustic guitar sound. We do this for every auditory object in the auditory scene - same as we do for vision. If a horse looks like a horse but behaves in some unnatural way then 'unnaturalness' is sensed. So everyday life & exposure to the normal sounds are enough to form the internal models necessary to judge 'naturalness' or 'relaism'. It's also true to say that we can differentiate some guitars from others but a guitar player usually has finer & more sensitive differentiation due to exposure, attention & practise with various guitars.

As regards recordings, I look on most of them as artistic enterprises, not an attempt at reproducing a real event. They often comprise of different micing arrangements & even different sections of the music, recorded at different times, in different studiois & stictched together to form an artistic interpretation which hopefully is in line with what the artists are trying to portray or what they want captured in their performance. To go back to vision, it's somewhat like a cubist painting where different perspectives of the same scene are stitched together in an aesthetically pleasing way which is intended to convey more than a direct representational painting would (at least that's my take on it).

With this perspective, I believe that it allows us to reconcile the various viewpoints & goals that people have in this hobby?

 

[NorthStar]

We did consider The Natural Sound as a name for our blog, given that all 3 have a heavy classical bent

There is a high end audio dealership in the Boston area called "Natural Sound". It's a good name.

And a distributor of fine audio products here: http://www.natural-sound.eu

There's also a distribution group using that name... edit: 853 beat me to it!

:b

 

[jkeny]

Hi Detlof,

I did three years of sociology and psychology as a double-major but dropped out and worked in a record store while playing in a band and attempting to get signed. (The band imploded just as we got some major label interest, but I did accrue a massive music collection, so it worked out well.)

You’re right of course. ‘Music of some sort’ is helpful when discussing the sort of socio-cultural aspects of music consumption and its attendant preferences. But my suggestion for the continued use of FMRI scanning is not so much to work out the fidelity of our systems per se, but firstly to A) avoid subject reportage which is inherently problematic and vulnerable to bias (i.e., “I said X but thought Y” and/or “I thought X but said Y”); and B) use it to compare and contrast brain response to the same piece of music on two different systems.

This is very much still a nascent area of research, so I’m not holding my breath for it to happen anytime soon. But you never know.

As to how we differentiate between music and non-music, that's been investigated by Sam Norman-Haignere, Nancy G. Kanwisher, Josh H. McDermott in their research paper "Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition".

Link here: http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract...ieve/pii/S0896627315010715?showall=true&cc=y=

853guy, I agree with most of what you say but I would have a couple of caveats.
I think the idea of drawing a very firm dividing line between music & non-music is mistaken - I believe there is a gradation between the two - defining what is music is not an easy task - there are a lot of rhythmic sounds in nature that would straddle this divide & I'm not sure how the researchers on that paper made the differentaition (I couldn't find a non-paying version of the aper to read)

The second caveat I would have is just to take some pause about fMRI as an analysis tool. The problem up to now with fMRI has been that it isn't fine enough resolution to be very useful beyond a certain point - see here for a primer on fMRI & voxels (the finest cluster of cells that it can resolve). The recent research is considered a breakthrough - as far as I understand it, as it is using complicated data analysis to extract information related to finer levels than the voxel limits.

Although I fully agree with you that taking the subjectivity out of perceptual testing is the way to make better progress in this area & I hope that these latest breakthroughs in fMRI prove to be an advance, I always take pause when heavy mathematics are used for deriving 'truths'

 

[Al M.]

853guy, I agree with most of what you say but I would have a couple of caveats.
I think the idea of drawing a very firm dividing line between music & non-music is mistaken - I believe there is a gradation between the two - defining what is music is not an easy task - there are a lot of rhythmic sounds in nature that would straddle this divide & I'm not sure how the researchers on that paper made the differentaition (I couldn't find a non-paying version of the aper to read)

Indeed. It is dubious to rely on a traditional or 'classical' definition of music. Also, some ambient music, e.g. with slowly modulating electronic drones, has barely anything that qualifies as rhythm on a 'normal' time scale. You can also use speech from a radio and lay imitative/modulating speech over it as musical process, as happens in some avant-garde music. Rhythm in that case becomes a very broad or opaque concept.

Music in its most general idea is organization of sounds in time. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[Detlof]

Music in its most general idea is organization of sounds in time. Nothing more, nothing less.

i respectfully beg to differ. Music in its most general idea is an organisation of sounds within rhythm, pitch and time. Not quite the same thing.

 

[Detlof]

:b

LOL, the cave is getting overcrowded, but then I-ll meet you there, just listened to a mastertape copy of Glenn Gould's rendering of the 1981 Goldbergs and it sounded damned natural and I was stone cold sober......

 

[853guy]

853guy, I agree with most of what you say but I would have a couple of caveats.
I think the idea of drawing a very firm dividing line between music & non-music is mistaken - I believe there is a gradation between the two - defining what is music is not an easy task - there are a lot of rhythmic sounds in nature that would straddle this divide & I'm not sure how the researchers on that paper made the differentaition (I couldn't find a non-paying version of the aper to read)

The second caveat I would have is just to take some pause about fMRI as an analysis tool. The problem up to now with fMRI has been that it isn't fine enough resolution to be very useful beyond a certain point - see here for a primer on fMRI & voxels (the finest cluster of cells that it can resolve). The recent research is considered a breakthrough - as far as I understand it, as it is using complicated data analysis to extract information related to finer levels than the voxel limits.

Although I fully agree with you that taking the subjectivity out of perceptual testing is the way to make better progress in this area & I hope that these latest breakthroughs in fMRI prove to be an advance, I always take pause when heavy mathematics are used for deriving 'truths'

Hi jkeny,

When we discuss the art form socio-culturally prescribed to be ‘music’, yes I agree, defining what it is and is not is problematic. Kanwisher, McDermott and Norman-Haignere’s research is the most comprehensive so far in making an attempt to define it, but even they admitted “It’s difficult to come up with a dictionary definition… music is best defined by example.” That is, they simply played subjects 165 of the most commonly heard sounds and let the data reveal itself. In this case, the study was hypothesis neutral, which is to me, more revealing of what sounds our brains consider to be music and what they do not. Of the six basic response patterns the brain used to categorise incoming sound, four responded to general physical properties, the fifth speech, but the sixth not only responded specifically to music, it responded to every musical clip they played, regardless of whether it was a solo drummer, whistling, pop, rock, Bach, melodic or rhythmic.

This was in distinction to English speech, foreign speech, non-speech vocal, animal vocal, human non-vocal, animal non-vocal, nature, mechanical and environmental sounds, some of which were rhythmic in-and-of-themselves (walking, breathing, ringtone, cellphone vibrating, water dripping, phone ringing, sirens and alarm clocks, for instance). Speech, long thought to be the dominant neural process in which music is perceived, is much more homogeneously contained, and did not trigger a neural response in the same way music did. That the brain gives specialised treatment to music in the same way it does speech - with no crossover - is in itself is certainly a breakthrough.

And yes, voxel decomposition was necessary because of the limits of FMRI analysis. However, they did search for components with non-Gaussian weight distributions in order to create the algorithm (“negentropy” and Gamma-distributed) and although both methods explained reliable voxel response variance, they went with the first one which did not depend on a specific parameterisation of the data, and were robust to the specific statistical criterion used. Until we have greater pools of data to analyse, or indeed, have FMRI scanners that can move beyond the current limits of its resolution, it’s the best we’ve got.

But as to whether it constitutes a ‘truth’… Well, it’s probably easier to define ‘music’, and much less philosophically problematic.

P.S. Do you have any links to research in which there are rhythmic sounds in nature which our brains mistake for music? I’m very curious, as I’m not currently aware of any.