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Comment by phasetransition | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has nearly two decades moonlighting experience as a live sound mixer, stories like this remain a reminder at how bad humans are in general at hearing.

These two instruments are both great, but the Hammond is no analog for a pipe organ. Neither in tone nor the way it interacts with room acoustics. It's fascinating that this could even be a plausible discussion.

You can improve your hearing markedly with practice. I didn't start with "golden ears" but have improved a great deal even as my ears age. But many of my worst days behind a mixing desk got the most positive response from the general audience.

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I've gotten quizzical looks from friends when I mentioned how much certain distorted guitar tones and tremolo picking sound very similar to bowed string instruments, particularly the cello.

You can easily imagine someone furiously playing a cello when listening to a lot of death metal, especially Swedish death metal with the classic Boss HM-2 pedal sound.

They didn't really get it, and most of them are pretty big fans of Apocalyptica, who very specifically play heavy metal on cellos. Still, they didn't make the same connection, which made me wonder if my hearing is a bit odd.

You could also add the asymmetrical waveshape of the "blat" of several types of horn instruments (e.g. trombone) to that list of similar tones.

Frankly you make it sound like it's better to not know.

Unless you're in music production, learning "how bad things sound" doesn't sound like a good thing.

Generally I would agree that if you exercise this muscle, it can be hard to turn off.

There's still a lot of room for art in the process, though. With experience you get less attached to your particular sonic leitmotifs, and that helps. Even if you would not personally mix it the same way.

What do you mean, humans are bad at hearing? Most humans have great eardrums. Isn't hearing subjective, and dependent on the goal you are "hearing for"?

What do you mean with golden ears? Do you mean perfect pitch? The ability to hear what is not intended by the sound source to be there?

There's a difference between simply hearing a piece of music and enjoying it, and being able to pick out the individual elements and identifying them. It takes training and experience, and it absolutely isn't mandatory, but I've found that I enjoy music even more after I started understanding its elements.

I'm not speaking of the sensor, but rather the meat computer interpreting it.

Things you can train for include: being sensitive to minute changes in level/frequency/time, picking one source out of many, precisely placing items spatially in stereo, listening for specific types of audio artifacts.

Golden ears could include perfect pitch, but in the production context pp might be translated to a specific frequency, rather than a note.

> I'm not speaking of the sensor, but rather the meat computer interpreting it.

I don't know what rock I've been living under, but that's the first time I've heard the brain referred to as a 'meat computer'. What an image! In any event, a quick search surprisingly didn't turn up any Wikipedia page, bit mostly pages (e.g. 1) denouncing the idea of the brain as a meat computer, associating it with the flailing concept of phrenology (designating regions of the brain as controllers of specific tasks).

I'm not a neuroscientist, but based on all of the pieces of evidence describing brain function I've consumed over the years, it seems obvious to me that the meaty neurons brain to appear to be 'computing'.

1. https://mindmatters.ai/2018/08/the-brain-is-not-a-meat-compu...

Ok, then I understand what you mean, and I agree with you. Most people are bad at hearing, in that context, for sure.

Or rather, we who have decades of experience in this field, have over average capacity for processing music and the sounds/patterns we have studied/practised. Then again, that is true for every field.

I do not however, believe "most people" (with less developed hearing) are relevant to why this "battle for the organs", came to be.

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