Undisembodying Recorded Music
charlespetzold.com
charlespetzold.com
The musicians I met there were a friendly bunch, and usually were totally ok, provided I sent them a copy, too.
I cherish these recordings a lot to this day. Not only because I was 10 years younger back then, although that too, but also because the performance sounded more authentic precisely because it wasn't overproduced, thoroughly compressed, denoised, and equalized to hell. There are people talking in the background, the floor boards may squeak sometimes, and it's a very immersive experience.
I like hearing the air hissing quietly into the microphones. When it's not there, the sound is uncanny. When it's there but there's a lot of editing, you can hear it change, and that's uncanny too. When it had been there and got subsequently removed, often a noticeable portion of "signal" is removed too, and the sound becomes very "artificial".
Sometimes I like a good studio recording, too. It's just that I like it for different things: mostly it's to hear what the musicians really intended to convey, provided, of course, that the album had been mastered to their preferences.
I had an idea that I wanted to write a script to pull out and stitch together all of the ambient sound from their recordings I find it so relaxing. If it's not been done already by someone.
I use remotes, since the paint on the buttons of the H4n came off. The buttons work, but one has to remember which is which.
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with live jazz. Every Friday and Saturday, I’ve been at a local joint to catch a few sets. Hearing good players live makes me appreciate older albums even more.
There are great live albums too like Full House by Wes Montgomery or After Hours by Charlie Christian & Dizzy Gillespie. Some of them even have video from live concerts in the ~60s.
I suppose it’s different with jazz albums as they’re not typically overengineered or note perfect anyways. The main issue is accurate reproduction; it obviously doesn’t sound like real life... The upright bass in particular tends to sound quite different. On the other hand, live music has lots of people talking in the background except on special nights where everyone seems to shut up and listen.
But these albums are a way of connecting as far back as the 30s and they’re crucial for learning the tradition & origins of modern jazz. Depending on your setup they can still sound quite good.
For years I was all about live recordings of music, but with youtube there's a scad of amazing videos of music being played. It makes all the difference in the world and I don't care that the audio quality is worse. I haven't listened to music that wasn't a video recording of a live performance for some time.
One implication might be heavy use of youtube_dl since the copyright elves are going to continue to bring their attention to the matter.
As a complete aside, Petzold's "Code" book is one of the best computing books I've ever read, and totally informed my career after I read it in high school.
This doesn't contradict Petzold's glee for yt, bc his yt is a yearning for less edited performances.
There is a lot of work being done in VR research labs to simulate realistic audio by using the correct transfer function when playing the audio track. If done properly, listening to prerecorded audio of a concert would be indistinguishable from a live concert. But doing it correctly requires dynamically adapting the audio stream for the user's head & ear shape and ear position with respect to the audio source.
Synthetic spatial audio that passes a Turing test has been done in the lab but we probably won't see it in consumer devices for a few more years. VR headsets and Airpods are slowly getting there, but they don't simulate the user's ears.
It seems to me this would be really dependent on the type of music and the size of the venue.
In a large percentage of the bigger shows I've been to, the sound was honestly pretty awful. That's not really what I was there for. I was there to see what the artist(s) could do unedited in real time, in person, and to be (somewhat) physically near them when it happened. It's a different skillset from what they do in recordings.
One thing I remember is that, according to him, a large amount of classical music sounds much better when the transfer function approximates a relatively tall, narrow room (like a cathedral) than when it approximates a relatively short, wide room (like a modern concert hall).
(note that construction spans, lighting, and ventilation, all conspire to make historical rooms taller and narrower than our typical rooms)
1) Room modes. Small rooms are far more destructive because they feature hot-spots where the sound waves (especially the low end) are either cancelled out or reinforced in a way that makes them too loud. Large ceilings and lots of the depth to the room give the low frequencies space to propagate completely and a more even frequency response that isn't lumpy or lacking when you stand in certain parts of the room.
2) Reverberation. Pretty obvious, but the average length of the echoes/reverberant tail increase as the room gets bigger. This is gives an ambient quality to the sound that is well suited to orchestral ensembles. You could probably argue that the history of orchestral composition grew in tandem with this quality and informed the choices that were made or play best with the qualities of a room large enough to house an orchestra and audience. That said, highly percussive music might be muddied or hard to articulate cleanly if it's fighting against a massive reverb tail in a cathedral.