Recording to Learn

Because of it's ease of use, I've been using the little Sony PCM to record all the performances of the Kenwood Players. Then I run the audio into the Tascam 2488, tweak if needed, master and then make CDs for everyone. I've learned a tremendous amount by listening back, and several members of the group have spontaneously said how much listening back to performances has helped them.

The thing that's so interesting is that they've all mentioned things they need to improve that I hadn't really noticed. And when I talk about what I hear in my playing and singing and don't like, they seem a little surprised.

I think that if you are fairly familiar with how your instrument works and have a pretty good notion of the kind of music you want to make, recording yourself and listening back, while not the same as having a good teacher, is at least as helpful overall. It's that old saw about how we're all our own worst critic. The thing of it is, when I hear something deep in the substance of the music I want to improve, that work seems to improve other aspects of the music as well. 

Another way of putting it is that when you hear a recording of your music making and notice something that needs improvement, you know exactly what the problem is in a gestalt kind of way, with both the left and right brain in on the awareness. No teacher talking to you about your playing can get something like that across so completely.

(The header photo just to please the eye and our Vermont readership. It's about the last bloom on a volunteer sunflower just out the back door. Just wish I could catch the moments when I've seen the goldfinches perched on one eating seeds)

Loud Music

This article doesn't link back to the original research, but the notion makes sense. Apparently there's a primitive part of the inner ear, the sacculus, that can respond to the rhythm of music louder than 90 decibels by triggering the release of endorphins. This would explain why volume can be such an intensifier of the effects of rhythm, but not so much the other elements of music. 

>>Neil Todd, an expert in the scientific study of music, explains that the sacculus seems to be part of a primitive hearing mechanism that has slowly been lost as humans have evolved. He said it has a connection to the part of the brain responsible for drives such as hunger, sex and hedonistic responses.<<

Distinguishing Tones

Scroll down this grab bag article to the second headline for a report on brain research done with people who have trouble distinguishing tones. Basically it's all brain wiring, and the basic fact of all the new brain research is that we can rewire things through behavior. Here are a few snips:

. . .  "The better you can tell the difference between two tones, the larger that particular brain pathway was," Loui said. The findings do not mean there is no hope for tone deaf people, however. "I think there's a lot of music training in general that could help enlarge these pathways," Loui said. . . .

. . . In fact, a treatment for tone deafness might also help people with speech disorders such as dyslexia, she said. There has been evidence that people with dyslexia have same auditory processing problems as people with tone deafness, she said. Her lab showed last year that children with musical training performed better on dyslexia tests. . . .

. . . .In theory, in Deutsch's view (talking about perfect pitch), it should be as easy to call a pitch "F" as it is to say that an object is red or blue. "If you assume that there's something missing in our environment in terms of early exposure to the right types of sounds, and that it is bundled in with speech, then the whole thing makes sense," she said.

Brain & Hearing

We don't all hear the same thing the same way. Part of it has to be genetic. Part of it is also how our brains are programed by previous experience and social conditioning. Here's a neat example of that over on John Ericson's Horn Notes.

He's reviewing a model of horn no longer made that has a certain reputation among horn players. In this quote he's describing the results of a blind listening test.

>>The results . . .  show that when people did not know it was a Reynolds they loved the tone and when they did know it was a Reynolds they hated it.<<

Music & Hearing

This article discusses research showing musicians are better able than non-musicians to hear and understand speech in a noisy environment.

>>The findings strongly support the potential therapeutic and rehabilitation use of musical training to address auditory processing and communication disorders throughout the life span. . . 

 . . . Such populations could benefit from the reordering of the nervous system that occurs with musical training, according to the study. Because the brain changes with experience, musicians have better-tuned circuitry—the pitch, timing and spectral elements of sound are represented more strongly and with greater precision in their nervous systems. . . 

 . . . The results imply that musical training enhances the ability to hear speech in challenging listening environments by strengthening auditory memory and the representation of important acoustic features.<<

CDs vs. mp3s

I've always thought of hearing as more of an extension of touch, not a completely separate sense. Your eardrum is really just skin with extra sensitivity than can feel sound waves. Then all the amazing mechanisms behind the ear turn that information into something the brain can process. 

If music has a strong bass line, or is just loudly played, we can feel it tactilely throughout our bodies. To my mind, that has to be part of how music can so affect us.

If all that's true, then listening to music via earbuds or headphones means your experience of the music is diminished. Terry Teachout, of the About Last Night blog over in the blog list, said sometime back that earbuds were fine, as most folks his (our) age are losing the ability to hear the higher frequencies that are lost turning CD quality sound into mp3 quality sound. 

Part of all this might be that we all listen to music differently. A critic has to be very analytical if he's going to be able to say anything interesting about the music. If you're dancing to the music, you're probably listening to and feeling the music differently, in a more non-verbal mode.

A great experiment would be to have a one group of folks dancing to a live band behind a curtain and another group dancing to that same music via earbuds off in a different room. My guess is the people who can feel the music as well as hear it are going to have more fun, and that their dance movements will be more fluid.

UPDATE: Here's a post on The Overgrown Path, one of the very best music blogs, talking about this subject.

Crumb's music just doesn't make sense unless you can physically experience the visceral quality of the sound, and you need serious loudspeakers to do that. Yet, much listening today is done on PC speakers, or even worse in-ear headphones that are prevented, again by the laws of physics, from reproducing the soundstage in front of the listener lovingly created by the recording engineer.