mike1127
Member of the Trade: Brilliant Zen Audio
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- Oct 16, 2005
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We are often told that some equipment is more distorted, but has "good-sounding" distortion, or so-called euphonic distortion. That's why we like it. Less accurate, but we like it better. Vinyl and tubes are sometimes said to fit this category. I've never been happy with this characterization because vinyl and tubes are usually the higher performers---the higher-resolution format.
There may be a way out of this jam: I think there is an overlooked third category of experience.. that distortion has a way of increasing accuracy. A way of making us tube/vinyl nutcases happy not by tickling our euphonic funny-bone, but by giving us more of the original music.
Think edge-enhancement algorithms.
Let me describe musical beauty and enjoyment. To a greater extent than other art forms, musical beauty is about relationships and patterns than can often be described analytically or mathematically. A lot of scale and harmony theory is like that. Intervals are like that. Who knew that a I-IV-V-I progression would not be just a bunch of ratios, but have feeling? Quite remarkable.
Here's a diagram that represents conceptually some types of relationships. Note that relationships occur in the time domain as well as the frequency domain... the ones occurring in time are called "rhythm". Here's I've abstracted both to resemble any kind of relationship in size and space:
The red lines indicate some of the precise relationships that hold. For example, the corners of the boxes all line up. Note that the boxes get larger from left-to-right. Note that the little vertical boxes below line up with the boxes above. These are analytical relationships. What is surprising about music is that such analytical relationships produce feeling.
Note: It is critical to enjoyment that the relationships be clear and easy-to-spot. Feeling like you have to exert effort to perceive what's there is, in my experience, the fastest way to ruin the experience.
As long as we are using visual analogies to the detection of precise relationships, why don't we just use an English text, like this one. The analogy here is the perception of the shapes of letters is analogous to the perception of musical relationships:
A type of distortion would be loss of focus:
It's not just that the original appearance has been lost; it's that ease of reading has been lost. You can still make out some of the information, but you have to work at it. And that will decrease your enjoyment and make the overall experience unrealistic. It is not a high-fidelity copy.
Now, let's a apply more distortion: an edge-sharpening algorithm:
This is a big improvement in ease of reading. Maybe it does not recover any hidden information, but the improvement in ease is a critical factor of aesthetics.
These pictures might seem kind of unrelated to music, but I have a theory that in music, transients and relationships between transients are everything.
Some evidence comes from an interesting kind of artificial music synthesis called "granular synthesis" in which complex sounds are built from little bursts of sound. This demonstrates that the overall effect depends on the relationship (on a very, very fine level) those bursts have to each other.
We know that different equipment, especially digital and analog recorders, have very different transient response.
The key, then is: given the fact that the recorder WILL distort the transient, does the it portray transients in a way such that they can be "read and comprehended" by the musical brain? Given a choice between non-perfect systems, like tape that rolls off gradually around 24 KHz, or digital that has a brick wall filter at 22KHz... neither is perfect, but they have VERY different transient performance, and hence a great deal of influence on "transient comprehendibility" (a term I'm making up to mean our ability to detect key relationships in the time and frequency domains).
To recap: many of us like our tubes and vinyl. So are they more accurate or do they have distortion that just "sounds good"? I propose a third category.
There may be a way out of this jam: I think there is an overlooked third category of experience.. that distortion has a way of increasing accuracy. A way of making us tube/vinyl nutcases happy not by tickling our euphonic funny-bone, but by giving us more of the original music.
Think edge-enhancement algorithms.
Let me describe musical beauty and enjoyment. To a greater extent than other art forms, musical beauty is about relationships and patterns than can often be described analytically or mathematically. A lot of scale and harmony theory is like that. Intervals are like that. Who knew that a I-IV-V-I progression would not be just a bunch of ratios, but have feeling? Quite remarkable.
Here's a diagram that represents conceptually some types of relationships. Note that relationships occur in the time domain as well as the frequency domain... the ones occurring in time are called "rhythm". Here's I've abstracted both to resemble any kind of relationship in size and space:
The red lines indicate some of the precise relationships that hold. For example, the corners of the boxes all line up. Note that the boxes get larger from left-to-right. Note that the little vertical boxes below line up with the boxes above. These are analytical relationships. What is surprising about music is that such analytical relationships produce feeling.
Note: It is critical to enjoyment that the relationships be clear and easy-to-spot. Feeling like you have to exert effort to perceive what's there is, in my experience, the fastest way to ruin the experience.
As long as we are using visual analogies to the detection of precise relationships, why don't we just use an English text, like this one. The analogy here is the perception of the shapes of letters is analogous to the perception of musical relationships:
A type of distortion would be loss of focus:
It's not just that the original appearance has been lost; it's that ease of reading has been lost. You can still make out some of the information, but you have to work at it. And that will decrease your enjoyment and make the overall experience unrealistic. It is not a high-fidelity copy.
Now, let's a apply more distortion: an edge-sharpening algorithm:
This is a big improvement in ease of reading. Maybe it does not recover any hidden information, but the improvement in ease is a critical factor of aesthetics.
These pictures might seem kind of unrelated to music, but I have a theory that in music, transients and relationships between transients are everything.
Some evidence comes from an interesting kind of artificial music synthesis called "granular synthesis" in which complex sounds are built from little bursts of sound. This demonstrates that the overall effect depends on the relationship (on a very, very fine level) those bursts have to each other.
We know that different equipment, especially digital and analog recorders, have very different transient response.
The key, then is: given the fact that the recorder WILL distort the transient, does the it portray transients in a way such that they can be "read and comprehended" by the musical brain? Given a choice between non-perfect systems, like tape that rolls off gradually around 24 KHz, or digital that has a brick wall filter at 22KHz... neither is perfect, but they have VERY different transient performance, and hence a great deal of influence on "transient comprehendibility" (a term I'm making up to mean our ability to detect key relationships in the time and frequency domains).
To recap: many of us like our tubes and vinyl. So are they more accurate or do they have distortion that just "sounds good"? I propose a third category.
