...And as for discerning listeners claiming to hear a difference where science says there is none, we have a mic preamp in the studio that has an "air" switch, which activates frequency filters above what any human ear can hear. But those frequencies interact with frequencies that are audible, and it is interesting to hear how that switch opens up the top end of say a voice or guitar being tracked - even if "air" isn't right for that particular track...
-Joe Hone
Case in point there!
Frequencies that home speakers/headphones cannot reproduce are irrelevant without massive improvements in sound reproduction capability in the home....
For now and the foreseeable future, much as sub-audible frequencies may be *perceivable* and have an effect *in person*, they are not relevant for recorded music...
-JavaJones
*IF* that sound energy is not replicated by the playback system, then yes. *IF* that sound energy *IS* replicated by the playback system, then no.
Nor, in fact, are they relevant for *any* amplified music since there are multiple limits in place there, not least of which are the speakers, but also any live processing being done (reverb, compression, etc.). Even if your entire amplification system is analog, the speakers are still a limiting factor. As are mics that recorded it in the first place, for that matter! There is *so much compromise* throughout any music production process, whether analog or digital, that I think it's a bit silly to cling so tightly to the "purity" of reproducing the finished results with 100% accuracy. Hell, the placement of speakers in a person's room, or how old their headphones are (and thus how much wear they have been subject to, how clean and undamaged their drivers are) will likely impact the sound they perceive far more than the difference between 16 and 24 bit or 192kHz vs. 44.1kHz.
-JavaJones
You make some good points.
However, they're really not all that relevant to the basic question. That is, the question of limitations in equipment is the same question as limitations in the audio format, just applied to a different area of the recording, storage, playback chain of events.
i.e. The question can be applied to the audio format, the recording equipment, the playback equipment, etc. etc.
The basic question is about how sound energy affects people. Traditional audio science excludes a large amount of sound energy from the question, which I've pointed out is erroneous in my tiger example above, and how Joe Hone has pointed out with the "air" example.
Slayer does some interesting melodic harmonies, but they do it on 2 guitars instead of 1 because the frequencies interact differently. On 1 guitar, it sounds muddy. On 2 guitars, you get a nice, clean sound. How sound energy interacts with other sound energy is a very important consideration - the "air" example above nicely illustrates how inaudible sound energy is important in the equation.
On the practical side, well... it all depends. We simply do not know enough about sound energy to intelligently comment on how practical some of these considerations are. Conventional wisdom would tell us that these extremes in audio fidelity are impractical, or too expensive, or not really worth our time. I'm not going to dispute that. I am going to say that we don't know enough other than we know for a fact that what we know is not a complete representation of reality, i.e. it's overreaching in its conclusions, which is wrong.
As a further example to illustrate just how little we know about the effects of sound energy on humans, consider wind farm turbine sound...
http://www.telegraph...-say-scientists.htmlhttp://www.renewable...n-wind-turbine-soundhttp://windeffects.o...g/wind-turbine-noiseI'm pretty much just picking the top 3 search results there, but they are enough to illustrate some of the points that I've made above. The second article there from renewableenergyworld.com is a skeptical article that makes several mistakes and cites a study that is completely mistake for many reasons that I won't get into. I put it there to show the counter-argument in the debate.
There is a lot more information out there. One of the key things to pay attention to in that debate is how weighted sound is used. By using weighted sound curves, sound energy is excluded, but isn't that what the debate is about?
Now, if inaudible sound can cause harm like that, can it also be beneficial? We just don't know the answer to that question as nobody has really looked into that very much.
But if we discovered that sound in a particular inaudible range could affect people positively, would it be practical to use that? Or would it be cost prohibitive? Would the benefit be greater than any associated costs?
I'm not being a purist - I'm merely trying to frame the science in more realistic terms to reflect objective reality better.
When we actually know enough about how inaudible sound energy affects people, then we can more intelligently talk about how valuable (or futile) reproducing it is.
Recent Posts
