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need for larger velocity scales, 0-128 to small
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ozy
Guest

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 12:59 pm Post subject:

jemkeys25 wrote:

trying to achieve electronic acoustical perfection.

which would not be a bad purpose for a life.

I have not the talent for such perfection, but sure I'd like to.

Scott
Platinum Member

Joined: 16 Oct 2009
Posts: 1015

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 1:50 pm Post subject:

ozy wrote:

I spoke of REAL, existing, measurable dogs and barks. There's no need of consensus on the fact that "TWO dogs are barking"

I'm not talking about whether people can agree that two dogs are barking; I'm talking about people agreeing that the second dog is barking at (to use your earlier example) 3x the volume. As I've tried to say, that is the phenomenon I find interesting, as I personally do not feel I can tell when something is 2x or 3x as loud as something else. I do not find most of what you've written to be germane to that issue. Whether the fault is in my writing or in your reading, I am apparently unable to express myself clearly to you; and you likely feel the same about me. So please, let's just drop it.

ozy
Guest

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 2:21 pm Post subject:

Scott wrote:

I personally do not feel I can tell when something is 2x or 3x as loud as something else.

you bet you are.

in the same way you can tell if something is on your right side or left side, or above you, and at how many degrees, based on its noise.

Somebody attacks you shouting from behind, you know when and where to turn, you know if he is at 1 meter or 20. If asked "was it at 3 or 10 meters", you'll be able to answer.

Try.

And where that comes from? You can read volume and frequency of his scream, read them again after a 10 cm movement, and extrapolate position and speed.

The same way you can tell if something is near you, far from you, or middleway, based on sight and ear.

if you hadn't developed such skills, you couldn't even walk in a room where other people are, without bouncing into them.

It's mostly unconscious, but how do you think you orient into the space and time in your daily life? By digital maps? or by totally confused and unmeasured "there, here" vague references?

You daily avoid death by "reading" dopplers from cars and buses.

When I train players, I start from these skills, and there's plenty of objective measures embedded in their "subjective" perceptions.

If I say "throw at 30 feets", there's a good chance even a kid will throw at a distance which is surprisingly near to 30 times the size of his foot (make that 22ft because it's HIS foot).

They I say: "throw halfway", and if he is a street kid, he will. If he is a playstation-addicted brat, he will throw on his momma's out of anguish and nausea, but that's another story.

etc etc

people who have "good ears" (sound engineers, etc), who can mix 48 tracks singlehandedly, like I mix a salad, are usually people who have a clear perception of all of this, PLUS "digital" training (i.e. formalization of all of the above and deep knowledge of how MACHINES translate that).

Set in a studio they will know what sounds comes from where, and can easily detect that a reverb is "wrong, doesn't belong in the virtual room I am mixing into". Then they know how a electronic reverb can simulated "smaller room", but that's another story. It implies knowing how to formalize data, transimt them to machines, etc.

I know I can detect a middle C after hearing a middle A, and I can throw a ball 18 meters, 50 cm from the ground, my eyes closed.

I'm no Superman, it's there somewhere for everybody, needs just attention.

On the other hand, I can't SING a middle C out of the blue. I need to hear a middle C or a middle A first.

I so have perfect pitch, but imperfect ear (pun intended).

But mine is just lazyness. I chose to be a good player rather than a good musician too many times ago Crying or Very sad

If I had focused on the ear, I'd sing in perfect pitch (and throw bad ears? Shocked

)

Don't give up on what your mind and body can do when they cooperate

peter_schwartz
Full Member

Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 206

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 4:42 pm Post subject:

Scott wrote:

I personally do not feel I can tell when something is 2x or 3x as loud as something else.

I know you were addressing ozy, but... In my previous posts I offered you a constructive way to be learn how to ascertain 2x loudness, and went one step further to suggest that guessing wrong about levels is nothing to be afraid of. But then you characterize my response as one on "semantics" and further insist that you can't tell when somethings is 2x louder. Did you even try my suggestions? Guess not... You just keep insisting you can't do it. Well, as they say, you can lead a horse to water...

Scott
Platinum Member

Joined: 16 Oct 2009
Posts: 1015

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 5:08 pm Post subject:

peter_schwartz wrote:

Scott wrote:

I personally do not feel I can tell when something is 2x or 3x as loud as something else.

1) The aspect of the response that I referred to as semantics was your interpretation of my use of the word "comfortable," that's all. When you said "what is there to be uncomfortable about" I rephrased for clarity, or at least tried.

2) I postulated an even simpler experiment than yours... simply listen to the difference between one speaker and two speakers playing a mono signal off two channels of the same stereo amp. But as I said, what I found curious was that a) many people seem to have an idea of what "twice as loud" is without doing any such experiments; and b) many people seem to feel that the twice as loud point comes at about 10x power, as opposed to the double power (3 dB increase) that both your experiment and my experiment would lead toward defining as twice as loud.

I'm sorry I can't be more clear than this. I am not here asking for help or explanations, I just thought it was an interesting phenomenon. Let's move on please.

ozy
Guest

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 8:58 pm Post subject:

Scott wrote:

Let's move on please.

who's this guy? a traffic policeman?

hey Einstein! people here like to discuss synthesis for the sake of it.

digressions are there for one reason.

what with this "move on" s**t?

You can exit the debate if it disturbs you.

Scott
Platinum Member

Joined: 16 Oct 2009
Posts: 1015

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 9:16 pm Post subject:

ozy wrote:

Scott wrote:

Let's move on please.

Sorry. You had been engaging me on the topic, and I felt we had reached a stalemate of mutual misunderstanding such that further conversation was not likely to be productive, so I meant to signal only my own perspective, that I no longer wish to engage in this discussion with you. You are, of course, free to continue discussing it with anyone else. Enjoy!

jemkeys25
Full Member

Joined: 15 Jan 2011
Posts: 243

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 8:18 pm Post subject:

boys.boys now play nice.

ozy
Guest

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 8:33 pm Post subject:

jemkeys25 wrote:

boys.boys now play nice.

SNARL !!!

Kayemef

Joined: 02 Nov 2007
Posts: 45

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 10:37 pm Post subject:

I think someone is being is smartass and it's just too annoying too continue... That probably why Scott doesn't care and wants to move on.

You're both right... from Wiki (bold is from me)

Wiki wrote:

The sone was proposed as a unit of perceived loudness by Stanley Smith Stevens in 1936. In acoustics, loudness is the subjective perception of sound pressure. Although defined by Stevens as a unit, it is not one of the SI units. Such units meet the stringent criteria of metrology, which include being realizable in a highly precise and reproducible manner, and so transferable for scientific and industrial purposes in a range of contexts.
According to Stevens' definition, the sone is equivalent to 40 phons, which is defined as the loudness level NL of a 1 kHz tone at 40 dB SPL. The number of sones to a phon was chosen so that a doubling of the number of sones sounds to the human ear like a doubling of the loudness,[citation needed] which also corresponds to increasing the sound pressure level by approximately 10 dB, or increasing the mean square sound pressure by a factor 10 (since due to the major property of logarithms for any given sound pressure level

Wow ! Look at that, it's SCIENCE ! I learnt it in school ! YAY

From Music, Cognition and Computerized Sound - An Introduction to Psychoacoustics edited by Perry Cook. Pages 71-78
Very nice article by none other than the legendare Max Mathews - What is Loudness

Read it, it's all there

https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/75697810/Mathews,+Loudness.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1297755808000

Human perception is not directly mapped to linear SI units. Psychoacoustics is just one example of how scientist probe and undestand our bodies' way to look, hear and feal the outside world. It is interesting to notice how our brain does not always perceive reality in the same way physical/mechanical instruments do. I think this is the point Scott was trying to make - correct me if I'm wrong. A lot of fun things in this world depend on this concept - optical illusions, perceptual audio coding (MP3 or lossy compression is all about psychoacoustics and audio masking - google it), marketing or anything that fools our mind into seeing or believing something that isn't factually true.

Questionning the validity of sensory perceptions just because they don't correspond to our tools or meters is, in a sense, pointless. I think this is what Ozzy meant to say, and again, correct me if I'm wrong.

On the other hand, it's this same questionning that usually spurs innovation and encourages thought on the subject. I think that in the 1930s, Stanley Smith Stevens, the father of the sone, or Harvey Fletcher and W A Munson, the guys who brought us the Fletcher–Munson curves (google it). would have agreed with what Scott is writing - challenging the obvious concept that twice as loud is just twice as loud and wondering on how can we scientificaly describe how we perceive loudness.

This debate was over 70 years ago, move on.

Last edited by Kayemef on Wed Feb 23, 2011 7:58 am; edited 1 time in total

peter_schwartz
Full Member

Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 206

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 10:51 pm Post subject:

Right. These are the same points I made a few pages back when I explained that MIDI velocity steps can't be equated with dB's, and, that perceptions of loudness are dependent on the frequency content and pitch, and, that the readings on sound meters may not jibe with our every day perceptions. However, people who work in the audio field every day have no trouble being able to assess when they need something 2x louder or .25 dB softer at various frequencies.

StephenKay
KARMA Developer
Approved Merchant
KARMA Developer<br>Approved Merchant

Joined: 18 Jun 2002
Posts: 2979
Location: Scottsdale, AZ

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 11:13 pm Post subject:

peter_schwartz wrote:

However, people who work in the audio field every day have no trouble being able to assess when they need something 2x louder or .25 dB softer at various frequencies.

Yep: move the fader until it sounds good. That's the "talent" part. Wink

_________________
Stephen Kay - KARMA Developer • Karma-Lab - karma-lab.com

peter_schwartz
Full Member

Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 206

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 11:16 pm Post subject:

ozy
Guest

Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 10:33 am Post subject:

Kayemef wrote:

Human perception is not directly mapped to linear SI units. Psychoacoustics is just one example of how scientist probe and undestand our bodies' way to look, hear and feal the outside world. It is interesting to notice how our brain does not always perceive reality in the same way physical/mechanical instruments do. Questionning the validity of sensory perceptions just because they don't correspond to our tools or meters is, in a sense, pointless.

sorry for the OT, but my enthusiasm for the discussion has some background. I'll try to explain myself.

Questioning the validity of sensory perception, wrongly considered as un-objective BECAUSE non-digital (as if digital = objective)

is not only a big mistake.

It's become a global prejudice - which depends largely on the obvious and welcome improvement in machine-made assesments in physics, but that has become an excuse for rejecting the validity of self-evident, easily perceivable reality,

hence an excuse for abandonment of knowledge and discipline in PERSONAL but OBJECTIVE measurement.

May I translate that from Chinese?

Since an oscilloscope has become cheap, nobody cares about learning perfect pitch.

Since VA exists, people get mad if a synth knob is not scaled. They say (I read that on an analogue forum) that they can't program a synth "without parameters" (meaning "withour visual scales").

Since digital synthesizers and outboard have got nice graded faders, people (like Scott) will say that "there's no way of perceiving objectively a difference of loudness between two sounds".

We have "learned" to trust written scales MORE than what our ears tell us.

This has consequences.

In music: there's a lot of "perfectly quantized and mixed" s**t around. Crying or Very sad

VA synths are sold, with nice knobs and paramenters, which don't sound remotely as a good synth. But boy, the manual says that "frequencies are better than on a moog". So it must be true after all! Question

In general: once you loss faith in your eyes and ears, ANYTHING can be fed you by Madison Avenue or... Korg Press Office Wink

TherE's been a feedback effect of all of the above: once demoting sensory perception has been found useful, some ideological quarters have become to TEACH it.

I am told by the girls that in schools they teach them plenty of visual gimmicks, games, puzzles whose purpose is telling them that they should never believe in what they see, that the eye and ear are imperfect.

Which is bullshit, because SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS are read by human eyes anyway! So, you must perfetion instruments, but go on training ears and eyes as well!

It has become a bromide.

Movies like "Matrix" and the like have spread the idea that "digital is gonna replace reality". Then "computers think faster than humans" (not true). Then "reality can be carefully mapped and softwarized" (we are centuries from that, if even), based on scant evidence of some nice digital camera or three-dimensional printer.

Go figure.

This is something I consider really, really dangerous in educational terms.

Sorry, but I am educator and take some issues very seriously.

So, what I said is that if Scoot doesn't want to be capable of discerning two sounds, he is free to do so. His music will be of consequences. His business, not mine.

But if he militantly wants to demonstrate that it's not possible to do it, on a publico forum.

I'll refute him ENERGICALLY.

It's not about "being a smartass" [thanks fopr the personal remark, btw. very elegant], it'as about having thought about this a lot, because I have a dog in the fight (the mental efficience of people entrusted to me)

StephenKay wrote:

peter_schwartz wrote:

However, people who work in the audio field every day have no trouble being able to assess when they need something 2x louder or .25 dB softer at various frequencies.

Yep: move the fader until it sounds good. That's the "talent" part. Wink

both right on spot.

"Talent" is just the capapcity of USING what's in anybody's body and mind. WANTING to use it.

peter_schwartz
Full Member

Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 206

Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 11:28 am Post subject:

ozy, I'll fight ya to the death over who that smartass remark was intended for. Schoolyard, 3 PM, be there!

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