Music memory confusion.

[lazyfly]

Hi forum.

I've read on numerous occasions that we have a pretty pathetic music memory which is why it's so hard to be clinical about say, amplifier comparisons without them being side by side. Speakers too, unless they're so utterly different you simply despise one over another.

What's confusing about this is if we have such lousy memory for sound re: comparisons why do we think we know exactly how an instrument should sound, many of which we've likely never even heard in the flesh?

Cheers

[Coolin]

Well how about comparing to instruments and sounds you do know. Have you ever heard a piano for real? Mabey just some birds. natural sound is all around us. This is already everyones standard. Although you have not hears a certain instrument is is still possible to say if it sounds "right" (witch it usually wont) You cant say much about purely electronicly recorded music which has never traveled through the air.

I think 99.999% of the systems out there dont sound "real" like being able to recreate a sound space like you were really there. This is really very hard to do if not impossible. My system is not there iether but its getting better and better...
Although "flawed" there can still be very much listening pleasure with a regular system.

Our minds can play all kinds of tricks on us when listening hard to find some sort of difference between gear.
Our mood, health, expectations, time between switching *,volume settings, **listening in familliar enviornment or other etc. etc. and indeed aural memory.

* even when maching volumes, when you switch between gear there is a period of relative silence in which your ears will recover from the music (comparable to closing your eyes for a whileand being able to see better in the dark )thereby percieving the next piece of music to sound more detailed and have a bigger soundstage. This will happen unless you are switching within a few seconds or your comparing at very low volumes.

** You get accustomed to your own listening enviornment but it takes a while before you get used to the room when your somewhere else. This has to do with reflections, absorbtion etc.

Also, at very low levels even cheap gear can sound as good as much better stuff.

All in all alot of pitfalls........

Greetings, Coolin

[janneman]

Originally posted by lazyfly
[snip]What's confusing about this is if we have such lousy memory for sound re: comparisons why do we think we know exactly how an instrument should sound, many of which we've likely never even heard in the flesh?

Cheers

I don't think you can recognise an instrument you have never heard.
I recently was in India, and there I heard an instrument being played and I had no idea how it would look like, until I went into the shop where they played it. I expected some kind of stringed instrument because it sounded like strings, and that was what it was. But I had never seen it before, so I didn't have a mental picture of what it would look like.

There is some evidence that you DO have a mental picture of some sound sources, just like birds recognise mating songs they never heard before. But that is mostly very limited and connected to sounds that are important for survival of the individual and/or the species.

In that case, nature apparently took the wastefull way to directly implant that picture in your genetic makeup, rather than leave it to the learning machinery to figure it out; it may be too late by that time.

Jan Didden

[Cal Weldon]

Originally posted by lazyfly
[B] why do we think we know exactly how an instrument should sound.
[B]

Let's use a piano as an example. Since no two pianos will ever sound the same and you are likely to hear any particular piano in a live performance only so many times in your ilfe, then it seems to matter less that the piano sounds precisely replicated than that it sounds like a piano. A very lifelike sounding piano.

That's one of the reasons I like to listen to music on great big speakers. It feels more like being there. Even if you lose accuracy with PA drivers, you seem to gain some realism when running the tunes through the big boys. Something I just can't get from my sub and satllite system upstairs.

I don't seem to have trouble remembering what something is "supposed" to sound like. I enjoy being out in the yard on a saturday and identifying what tool is being used somewhere in the neighbourhood, by it's sound. If I don't recognize it, I'll wander over to see if there's some new tool on the block for me to borrow.

My thoughts on a Sunday evening,

Cal