Alcohol and perceived sound quality - Page 6

I agree with Uncle Erik. Drunk listening is a bit (maybe a lot) off topic. 

Ok so I have got myself inebriated just for this thread and done 2 tests in my car. The first with a dirty windscreen and one with a clean one.
On a neutral scale whilst sound is much much better after a few bevies the staging has become a lot more obvious. My sub installed in the glovebox (uk right hqnd drive car)on a 45hz LPF and 30db slope is now suddenly dragging the stage down and left giving the effect of the mid and high range the same effect. "But" the sound is so damn smooth. Th degredatation (percieved break up) is close to non existent.
Then I clean the window which was covered in the last weeks dirt and flies. On the negative staging becomes worse, especially left centre on a track with a german guy saying the positions as they should appear (for anybody interested this is the EMMA 2010 sound quality judging disk). Degradation on the other hand is as smoothe as you like. This is saying that I am much more open to visual suggestion than when sober.

So I can scientifically say that drunk with a stripper performing in centre stage then your on to a winner.

Were you still drunk when you wrote this?

 

BTW, I can unequivocally say that regardless of how things sound when drunk, everything sounds like crap now that I'm hung over. Time to pop another excedrin
 

 

Or another 15 Coronas .

 

I was thinking pretzels and churros.

Yes, why was it that obvious?

 

There has been a wonderful courting of drinking and human festival for as long as recorded history and we can guess much longer. It seems this higher state of being is needed at times and somehow can help us connect to a different state of awareness. Every year I go and visit an ancient tribe undergo a primitive mock war where they drink and then scratch each other with bushes. There is music and friendship even though there is also blood shed. The drink helps them go to the place they need to be and all have a great time. This event has gone on from before history and the village has existed for 1000 years at it's location. The start of this type of drinking is as old as man himself.

 

Many a performance has been helped by drinking. Funny how mixing does not share the trend.

Thins the blood, maybe makes your eardrums more sensitive... :D

Alcohol shuts off all parts of your brain functions but the part for primal instincts stays active but it also now becomes more dominate so things like sexual desires and anger is mostly associated with drinking. it's also allows for short rush of euphoria which can give you higher perceived enjoyment in certain activities. it's another reason why it gets a misconception that supposedly alcohol increases t-levels cause you get more horny but it does the exact opposite in reality and real world testing. only reason you get that way cause your primal functions is more dominate.

other things like pulling an all nighter will give the same perceived assumption music sounding better cause staying up the body becomes unbalanced and part that controls your release of endorphins is increased meaning higher rush of euphoria as well. another reason why most musicians even to this day enjoy alcohol or even getting high before playing cause it makes it sound better to them.

Mixing and production is a strange mixture of subjective art and objective measurement, with a bit of objective art and subjective measurement thrown in! For me personally, anything which messes with my perception causes the whole pack of cards to come tumbling down, even though it might sound great at the time.

I think for performance it depends, something which loosens the inhibitions (alcohol for example) can help improvisation and creativity but is usually detrimental to the technical ability needed to communicate the musical ideas. Sometimes a balance is reached and alcohol can enable a fantastic performance, unfortunately though this is a slippery slope. A point arrives where the musician cannot perform without drink (or some other substance), eventually the body gets used to the substance so more of it is required and finding that point of balance becomes ever more difficult. Eventually the musician either looses their skill and overdoses (either because they have lost their skill or in an attempt to find that balance again) or quits and gets on the road to learning how to perform without substance support. I've known a quite number of both in my time, unfortunately. I've had one or two friends who would probably be the best musicians in the world on their instrument but are either no longer performing musicians or are dead!

G