A greater intensity, mostly. Also, it’s not very rare, as lots of people do smell or taste molecules that others do not notice at all. Prime example in Germany is asparagus pee smell, as a huge number of Germans will celebrate asparagus season.
So I can smell asparagus pee (not only mine), cilantro tastes horrible to me and I smell even minuscule amount of hyacinth or notice tiny amounts of Marzipan or coconut in food, which renders it inedible for me. Still like coffee and licorice, though.
But I digress. Yes, some people have a better sense of hearing, but with psychoacoustic compression, they aren’t affected. It’s the people with hearing issues who have problems with old style MP3, as they basically don’t hear the dominant tones, which for normal (and super-hearers) listeners would be audible and masking other notes, I.e. the person with selective hearing hears a note that they aren’t supposed to hear. I guess the absence of tones is pretty noticeable and offputting compared to the uncompressed version, but in a way, they never hear the version that’s supposedly the original. Like a red/green blind person, who will never really see the picture an artist with baseline perception created for people with baseline perception. Same for the very few Tetra chromatic people.
I’m sure in the early 20th century there was a musician much like Young that decried the emergence of recorded music altogether. High fidelity vinyl would have no doubt been a total joke to this person. “It’s so…so…so…two dimensional!”
It might warm your heart to know that the depoliticized dance floor hit has made it a lot easier to get new people to sing along with it in highly political contexts.
Sometimes that creates a new genre. Napalm Death heard 10th generation dubbed copies of Insanity and Siege and could barely make anything out and assumed the barely legible snare was playing double the time it actually was. They tried to recreate what they thought they were hearing.
I remember hearing Thom York’s first solo album in 2000 and being fascinated by his intentional use of bad MP3 compression as a sound effect. Ha. I forget the album once but I had a vinyl record that had the clicking sound of a CD skipping in part of it. Made me do a double take when I heard it.
I don’t think I’m thinking of the same song as you, but I’ve heard a few songs (mp3s) that had that effect and it drove me nuts! I help mentally trying to fix the player only to realize that there’s no spinning disc and it was an intentional effect. I put that effect up there with putting police and ambulance sirens in music. It’s like fingernails on a chalk board.
@anon50609448, yeah, it was a gimmic just to say he had done it. But I’ve heard artists use it to, for example, play different instruments with themself. You could pre-record most of it if you wanted to do a live performance, but that’s starting to sound all Milli Vanilli to me. Might upset the live music purists. @KathyPartdeux, do you not like Hair Bands in general or was it him specifically (or both, I guess)?
Tiny Desk Concert always has awesome folks perform!
As for tUneYaRdS, I love her live looping. I think it shows just how much stuff like sampling and synthesizers have been a boon for both recording and live performances for musicians. We’re so far away from Keith Emerson lugging his Moog on tour… now an indie artist can use a few, relatively cheap, easy to transport instruments with them, and perform anywhere they like. And they can make professional sounding albums in their bedrooms, too.
Well said, squire! Post-scarcity audio bliss indeed! Not that ‘audiophilia’ and the mad pursuit of aural satisfaction does not bring with it its own raft of inconsolable neuroses and god knows what else…
Gonna steal “classhole argument” now! However, it does seem never less than ‘strange’ to me that in our era of ubiquitous earbuds and IEMs, so many can stand having shit sound in such intimate proximity? And it seems that, once yr casual music consumer has actually been introduced to something better, there is no going back?
I think there are a lot of people who think loud = good and that this is why Beats by Dre was so popular. This is fine–y’all do y’all–and a primary reason I prefer to wear headphones while commuting.
Yes and doesn’t digital compression have its rough equivalent in how all those hit records of the fifties and sixties were made to maximise their mono playback quality on shitty, primitive little turntables & speakers etc?
I’d also point out that the infamous Loudness War was happening to CDs even before MP3 hit the scene. Nothing like taking the 96 dB dynamic range of 16-bit audio (well beyond what a lot of consumer audio gear can handle in the first place) and squashing it to near-zero.
A well-mastered non-loudness-war CD is superb; as far as I’m concerned, 24-bit audio is best reserved for recording and mastering work. The SACD format was more about locking things down with DRM than anything else. Even if you have DSD-capable recording equipment, you can’t even make your own SACD discs, since the players will only play signed discs, and only the pressing plants have signing keys.
I’ve also noticed that cell phone codecs have greatly improved in recent years. A call that uses HD Voice throughout sounds far better than old-school landline, IMO. Of course, that also depends on reception and the willingness of cellular networks to interoperate.
Well said. A certain level of dynamic range compression (or judicious use of a soft limiter to deal with peaks) is sometimes necessary, but the loudness war is ridiculous.
I’ve made my own recordings of classical choral music, and sometimes a bit of parallel compression (splitting the source into two tracks, lightly compressing one, and mixing it back with the uncompressed signal) can make the difference between a recording that sounds good on most gear, and one that needs a truly heroic amp to listen at concert volume.
At other times, I’ve found that just applying some peak limiting on a few outliers is sufficient.
At this point though I wonder how much anymore of this matters to me personally not because I don’t care but because I may not be able to hear much longer.
Couple years ago I worked daily next to an industrial waterjet, and now I have tinnitus and it’s getting much worse.
I have no peace from it and I can no longer hear silence the way I used to, and yes I have sat several hundred feet under the ground in caves alone to know what absolute dark and absolute silence sound like, as close as I could. I know that my Baseline has changed in the last couple years and the ringing in my ears most of the time I don’t notice it but I always notice it when I go to sleep.
I never have quiet anymore. It is slowly driving me mad and I wonder how much of my music it has perverted to my own ears. Mainly I just miss being able to hear silence. I would get brain surgery to get rid of this if I had the option
