[gregorio]

I was supervising a sound mix once and the director told the engineer that there was a bump at a particular line of dialogue. The engineer ran back to it and looked at his board and the various channels that were activated. "Nope, no bump." "Listen again." The director said. The engineer stood up at the board to get a close look at his meters and ran it again. "Nope. no bump." The director said, "Sit down and close your eyes and just listen to it." The engineer did that and went, "OOHHHH! I see what you're talking about!" He located the channel and trimmed off a little but of dialogue that was hanging over at an edit point. Engineers are important, but they don't necessarily have a super ability to hear.

That's a trap we all fall into at some point. There's the age old sound engineer cliche; "Mix with your ears not with your eyes". Meaning; looking at waveforms, spectograms, pretty graphic UI's and meters is useful/essential but a good/experienced engineer knows to ignore all that and rely on his/her hearing perception as the ultimate arbiter of creative decisions. The engineer you've described either is not good/experienced or may have momentarily had "a short between the headphones" (another engineering cliche, for a "brain fart") and somehow forgotten the old cliche.

Engineers organize sound. That isn't the same as being able to hear things other people can't. They're good at making sound orderly and tidy. When it comes to striking creative balances, artists are better. Sometimes I think that may be because they can look at the overall, while engineers have to focus on details. That's the point I was trying to make.

Again, No! Artists are just as prone as engineers to focusing on details and missing the overall picture. The difference is that engineers do it all day for a living and are (or should be!) aware of the issue and constantly attempting to address it. Artists on the other hand are not so aware of the issue and not so accustomed to trying to combat it. If you want anecdotes, here's one that occurs almost daily: We've been working on something and the artist (or director in the case of a film/TV product) makes some comment about a sound//instrument being too loud, I say "are you sure, it's sounds right to me" and they respond; "no, definitely too loud", so I lower it until they're happy. Next day we're working on something else but run through the bit we did yesterday and the artist/director says "have you changed that sound/instrument again", "no, it's exactly the same as after we adjusted it" and the say; "OK but it's too quiet now, raise it a bit", so I do that and they instruct "no, a bit more", so I do it and they say, "that's it, perfect, what do you think?", to which I reply, "yep, sounds dead right to me too but then it would, because we're back at exactly the level I had it to start with."!

As I mentioned before; many of the creative choices specific to an artist's work must obviously be better made by that artist but, this is certainly not always the case and it's virtually never the case in general. The artist is necessarily focused on their own artistic vision, occasionally even to the detriment of their own work but almost certainly to the detriment of others' work. For example, while I'll listen, argue my point if I think they're wrong and ultimately do whatever the artist instructs, if we're talking about some other artist's work, then I'd take a good/experienced engineer over that artist every time, without hesitation! I therefore do not agree that in general artists are better at "striking creative balances". I also do not agree that engineers only organize sound but I agree that engineers don't hear things other people can't. I would put it differently though; while engineers don't hear anything that others can't, they can dissect and identify elements/aspects within what they are hearing, which untrained ears can't.

G

 

[bigshot]

Well, I mostly work with directors, not musicians. Maybe they think differently. The directors I worked with were all focused on clarity of storytelling, separating out sounds so two things weren't happening at once, creating rhytmic patterns of sound, and ultimately achieving a good overall balance. My process was to let the engineer do the ruff mix and then the director would come in to finish it. It was always a lot better at the end than the ruff mix, so I guess the process worked. My directors were always a laser beam on decisions, no parallel parking. One of them had gotten a reputation for being troublesome, but I realized that he just didn't know how to describe what he wanted to the engineers in technical terms. I had worked with him long enough I knew what he wanted, so he would tell me what he wanted and I would translate the direction into "engineerese". That actually worked a lot better than anyone thought it would. At the end of the series, the head of the studio took me out to dinner to thank me because I had saved him so much money in retakes. That was unusual. Producers usually aren't beloved like that.

 

[gregorio]

[1] Well, I mostly work with directors, not musicians. Maybe they think differently. [2] The directors I worked with were all focused on clarity of storytelling, separating out sounds so two things weren't happening at once, creating rhytmic patterns of sound, and ultimately achieving a good overall balance. My process was to let the engineer do the ruff mix and then the director would come in to finish it.

1. Yes, they do. Although musicians have an overview, they tend to focus on what they themselves are/were doing. A singer will focus on their singing, a drummer on their drumming, a violinist on the violins, etc. And, they are used to a particular perspective, a violinist for example hears the orchestra from the position of the violin section, not from the position of the audience. Even the conductor, when there is one, still hears from a position which is somewhat different to the audience.

2. Film sound is entirely different from music, the complexity and workflow are entirely different. In film the mixing process is divided into two distinct phases, the pre-mix and final mix phases. The pre-mix phase exists to comply with complex technical delivery requirements and to create a simplified mix scenario geared to the director (and producer) making the decisions in the final mix phase. There really isn't a "rough mix" in film, in the sense of a rough mix in music production, just a pre-mix which has not had much effort put into an overall balance because that's what the final mix phase is for and it would be effort wasted. Of course the final mix is better than the pre-mix and the pre-mix is not designed to be a "rough" version of the final mix.

I stand by what I said and disagree that "Musicians usually have a better ear for mixing balances than engineers though.". It seems that you are extrapolating your experience with film/TV to music and that is a mistake because they are so very different procedurally. The Director is not an artist per se, he/she directs the artists. There's not the space/time and it would be off-topic to go into the specifics of film and TV sound here but even as far as directors are concerned, it's not a simple as saying they have a better ear for mixing balances than engineers.

G

 

[ROCKNSS]

http://harmanhowtolisten.blogspot.com/2011/01/welcome-to-how-to-listen.html

 

[ev13wt]

Yes agreed .

But what about picking out a single voice in a choir or distinguishing a particular hall from a live recording?

If you haven't been to that location you never learned the "Gestalt" of the hall, as such you have no audio memory attached to these sounds and probably will not be able to figure out the hall. Its all about your audio database. You know how certain peoples voices sound, you can "hear" that voice and identify the person via a very crappy low fi recording.

So "listening fatigue" is a sum of various components, one of them being your audio database content.


That is why electronic music usually sound good on any system. You mind isn't in overdrive trying to figure out what instruments are plaing, from where, etc.


So critical listening is really only the amount of education one has about everything audio.

 

[ev13wt]

When listening to "Angie" by the Rolling Stones with a few friends many years ago, I noticed the track of Mick whispering the lyrics through most of the song. You can hear him distinctly whisper Angie at a certain point in the song but he also does it in the back ground very softly through out most of the song (it is barely audible ). When I pointed this out to my buddies, some where able to isolate the track and follow it while others though us crazy. All of us were around the same age and nobody has had any issues with hearing. What is also weird is there are times when I am unable to isolate it (always on the same equipment)

Your ears. The day to day, or even hour to hour variation of what your brain can "hear" can easily miss those cues on certain days where you are tired, had your car windows down on your commute home instead of up, the wife isn't home when you come home - all of these things factor in to what you hear.


This is also the anwer to the old question: "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" No. It does not make a sound. It only make waves. Someone with a brain and ears must be present for the tree to "make sound".

To get a better understanding of this topic. What exactly is critical listening? Is there something else other than the music that I should be listening for?

I've heard this phrase over the years , and never really understood the purpose. Is it for a particular thing in a song? Is it to evaluate how your gear preforms?
I just don't understand the difference between listening to music, and "critically listening to music".

I can listen to music and simply enjoy it. Like 99% of humans out there: I can even enjoy music on very bad playback systems.

Critical listening is for me the times where I actaully want to analyze the playback.


Since everything audio playback will never be the "same thing" as live, my critical listening is only used to understand the chain.

I played the drums for quite some time. I recorded drums in a studio. I played back drums through studio monitors, high end systems (speakers / headphones). I know how mics work, what eqing is, what "tricks" can be used to "make good sound" (gates, limiters, compressors, doubling, panning etc)

Never does it sound like the real thing. It doesn't make sense to chase thos percent. Critical listening means different things to different people. For me it is the complete analysis of what I am hearing. I wonder how the mics where placed, and why. I wonder about every single channel and what it is doing, where it might have been and so on and so forth.

 

[Soundsgoodtome]

This is a direct reply to the OP in this thread. Is critical listening a skill? Yes partly. It is also having undamaged ear mechanics (read you didn't mess up your hearing badly since you've had close to perfect hearing).

Critical listening is a skill that can be easily seen by someone learning an instrument. If I gave you a particular instrument that's able to create a complex sound, say a violin, and I told you to practice that violin for 10 years at least 2-3 hours a day. At the end of 10 years (probably even 1 year really), you can hear what is proper sound reproduction through headphones or speakers by strictly listening and not understanding a thing on the equipment being used to reproduce the music. HOWEVER where it gets tricky is the mind memory, so a particular detail in sound to a specific instrument may be so subtle that it's easily forgotten until a piece of instrument reintroduces that sound back into the picture. Up until you got to that piece of gear to let you hear a piece of the sound that didn't register in your sound memory, that detail in sound didn't exist to your reference - unless you're checking the playback with the live instrument simultaneously or with a A/B style on the fly switching/comparing.

I'm rambling or nah?

 

[bigshot]

When I was a kid, I had a dream where I thought that listening to a piano taught me how to play it. I tried to learn to play the piano and found out that it didn't work that way. Listening is passive.

 

[Soundsgoodtome]

After hearing a piano or violin live for some time your ears should train to pick up the sound in its true form and memory better serve when you're listening to reproduction. I reference piano and violin having grown up playin it.. harder for me to tell which is more accurate in reproduction if say it was an acoustic guitar or some other instrument I've never taken up.

 

[gregorio]

When I was a kid, I had a dream where I thought that listening to a piano taught me how to play it. I tried to learn to play the piano and found out that it didn't work that way. Listening is passive.

Hearing is passive, listening is active!

Critical listening is a skill that can be easily seen by someone learning an instrument.

After hearing a piano or violin live for some time your ears should train to pick up the sound in its true form and memory better serve when you're listening to reproduction.

I see this kind of misconception commonly here, which is apparently ingrained. There is no "sound in it's true form" or rather, there is an almost infinite number of "true forms". The "true form of the sound" depends on what specific individual instrument is being played, how it is being played, where it is being played and the relative position of the listener or microphone/s to the instrument (or sound source). Learning to play an instrument does require/involve also improving the information you appreciate/identify from what you are hearing but only as far as playing your instrument is concerned, there's a great deal more to critical listening than just appreciating, knowing and identifying what say a violin sounds like when you're playing it.

If you haven't been to that location you never learned the "Gestalt" of the hall, as such you have no audio memory attached to these sounds and probably will not be able to figure out the hall. Its all about your audio database.

Yes but it's the same problem as above. What is the "Gestalt" of the hall? That depends on what's being performed and where you are in the hall, different seating positions in the hall can/will have radically different sound. And, in most halls the acoustics change considerably when they are empty (say during rehearsal) compared to when they are full. Also, when mic'ing say an orchestra, we'll typically have an overhead mic array, some spot mics, some additional room mics, all of which are mixed together in the final product. How can one have an "audio database" which includes what a hall sounds like from a meter away from some of the instruments, say 5-10m above the orchestra and from the back of the hall, all simutaneously? Each of these listening/recording perspectives have a very different sound, but each of them also qualify as "true form of the sound". Mixing them all together arguably does NOT represent the "true form of the sound" because obviously you can't listen to an orchestra from all those different perspectives simultaneously. However, it's done that way because the overall end result more closely represents perception and expectation than any one "true form of the sound".

G

 

[bigshot]

After hearing a piano or violin live for some time your ears should train to pick up the sound in its true form and memory better serve when you're listening to reproduction. I reference piano and violin having grown up playin it.. harder for me to tell which is more accurate in reproduction if say it was an acoustic guitar or some other instrument I've never taken up.

It also depends on how the instrument is recorded. Close miked sounds different than at a distance. The perspective of the mix matters. In rock music you might get four different perspectives in the same mix along with purely electronic instruments. That's when it gets harder to tell by ear.

 

[BobG55]

"There is a craft and a power in listening." -Glenn Gould

 

[amirm]

Can critical listening be taught and refined ? Opinions

Of course. You need to go through a formal process. Being an audiophile, musician, knowing instruments, etc. none of it helps.

What helps is knowing what artifacts you want to learn about, having a system that creates that artifact on-demand, content that is more revealing than not, and lots and lots of time spent learning. It also helps to understand the theory behind it all.

I am trained in hearing compression artifacts. I remember despite being an audiophile for some 30 years, I could not hear any compression artifacts back in 1990s. It damaged my ego something furious. But I was fortunate enough to manage the team that developed lossy codecs at Microsoft so I set out to learn. It took about 3 or so months and all of a sudden, what I could not hear before, became child's play. A nice side-effect of that was that I became far more observant in hearing small artifacts of any sort.

Another domain that I trained myself some is hearing speaker frequency response errors. I did that using Harman's "How to Listen" software. See http://harmanhowtolisten.blogspot.com/

I did not practice enough to get to level 12 which I is the requirement for Harman's trained listeners. But enough to beat the guy sitting next to me.

I plan to do a training video on hearing artifacts and techniques used to do so.

 

[Prog Rock Man]

I think it is not a skill as such, but it is useful to be able to "tune " your ears if you are into your music and hifi. By that I mean, casual listening, not concentrating, my ears are not tuned, I am not listenign critically. A new album, concentrating and really listening, my ears are pretty tuned. Auditioning kit and my ears are highly tuned and I am critically listening. I had a series of tracks used for reference, such as Massive Attack's "Angel" for the ability to cope with a deep bass sound and a click in the opening section and Pinks Floyd's "Summer '68" and dynamic range when the horns kick in.

I think that the ability to switch off critical listening is vital if you want to be able to enjoy your hifi and the music.

 

[bigshot]

I think it’s not a good thing to train yourself to hear noise. Better to train yourself to be a good music listener.