What's the highest general frequency music stops at? - Page 3

Try cutting out 3 kHz and see what you describe that as.

No, it just gives the instruments the same pitch, but there's more to it. There's attack, sustain, decay ...

 

What did you use to filter out frequencies above 16 kHz and what track?

Probably the itunes equalizer

To solve this conundrum on a personal level take a well-liked track and in Audacity or similar make a copy and apply a low pass filter at any arbitrary frequency point. Then do a blind test between the filtered and unfiltered files. With a bit of experimentation you can find the point at which you personally stop being able to reliably (15/15) detect the filter. All the proper research we have using blind tests suggests that carefully filtering off frequencies above 18K  or even 16k is not reliably detectable. I have an old AES paper somewhere I'll look it out...

 

here it is...

 

 

TERUO MURAOKA, YOSHlHlKO YAMADA, AND MASAMI YAMAZAKI (JOURNAL OF THE AUDIO ENGINEERING SOCIETY APRIL 1978, VOLUME 26, NUMBER 4) 

 

 

PS can we please end the "I think/believe/feel/suspect" I can hear the difference anecdotes - it is not hard to set up empirical tests !

Edited by nick_charles - 11/22/12 at 10:49am

No need for tests to tell what 12kHz and above sounds like. all you have to do is try it with a good equalizer. It's not so much "not beng able to detect" as much as it's "it's just a miniscule part of the music". Too many people talk about specific frequency bands without knowing what they really sound like. I've done a lot of eqing, so I hear something and I can go right to the correct neighborhood to fix it.

i have done my fair share of eqing you know. i know what im talking about

Edited by streetdragon - 11/22/12 at 11:23am

Then you know the relative importance of the various octaves in the audible spectrum. The one at the top is the least important.

although it may not be entirely important in the music's core, it is those frequencies that provide the treble sparkle. kind of like the icing on a cake.
also since its easily in our audible range it is quite likely that cutting out a portion out of it will take away a noticable part of the information in the music

I used FL Studio's Fruity Free Filter and Parametric EQ 2 and I used a few EDM tracks that I produced. I also just tried with I'm Not Alone by Calvin Harris (EDM) and BaBopByeYa by Janelle Monae (jazz). The difference was obvious in the electronic music, but not present at all in the jazz at 16kHz, and was very difficult to discern at 12kHz. There looks to be a huge genre gap in the answer to this question.

 

my deepest thanks for you, that solves everything.

Did an engineer's filter test with the chebychev type 2 filter with order 20 and rejection -120db with my speakers. I don't think my speakers extend very far but I stopped hearing stuff at 18khz and at 17khz its only bells and maybe some "airiness" exist but virtually nothing else. I must say that normal equalisers and even normal parametric eq can't do with Engineers filter can in terms of rejection and slope steepness. Did the test with Adamant Faith by Suara, Violet recording ver. by marble and Frangelica Pt1 from Sound Theories by Steve Vai.

Edited by firev1 - 11/23/12 at 7:07am

 

 

I don't think anyone is arguing it's as important as the other audible octaves. But if cutting it off provides an easily audible difference, it is pretty important. I'm sure you wouldn't recommend that anyone should buy a speaker/headphone that has a frequency range of 20Hz-10kHz.

Would it not be easier to cut off everything below the given frequencies and listen to what is left vs. trying to pick it out among the entire range of audible frequencies...?  I'm a total audiophile noob and am only hear to learn what I can but it seems like a logical solution to me.

read up on masking, differs a little at the edges, but in general stuff just one octave above a tone has to be >5% of the amplitude of the octave lower tone to register at all due to the masking effect of the lower frequency tone

 

so cutting the lower stuff may enable you to hear the residual highs that would be masked with the full spectrum music

 

 

also critical bands at higher frequency are about 20% width - so 16k-20k is just one critical bandwidth - pretty much everything in that range gets lumped together

why didn't i think of that?
so i tried cutting out from the bottom instead. i was still able to tell the beat of the music with 10khz and 12khz cut off point. at 14khz it was getting hard to hear anything significant and at 16khz cut off point i could hardly hear anything. and nothing at all from 16.5 khz above