Leopold
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2006
- Posts
- 124
- Likes
- 10
Quote:
Thank you for the idea, edstrelow! I have now read the paper you referred to, the concept of synesthesia was unknown to me. It is interesting, and although I find the explanations given in the paper strange and far-fetched, I can recognize similarities with “my case”. This is going to be a ridiculously long post but since I’m already knee-deep I might just as well continue. I will also propose some personal views of sound that not everyone will agree with.
“Synesthetes are surprised to discover that others do not perceive words, numbers, sounds, taste, and so forth as they do.”
I must admit, one thing I found a little peculiar since the start of this thread was how few of you that tells about similar ‘tactile headphone experiences’. At first I thought maybe this is just one of those insignificant things that not many people find interesting to notice. Later on, from the insights provided by you, we arrived at a plausible conditioning-based explanation for the illusion. It does not explain why so few can feel it, though. This is because the majority of this community would share this ‘tactile conditioning’ from real experiences of everyday sounds, from thundering waterfalls to chainsaws - well, everyone that cares to enter the real world once in a while. Also, I’m not exactly alone in enjoying full-sized live music experiences.
Yes, I’m surprised that so few Head-fiers share this tactile experience. I don’t believe the phenomenon of synesthesia is applicable in this case though, and I’ll try to explain why.
--- --- ---
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: you will never experience the tactile feel of a grand organ through headphones if you forgot to (or never cared to) explore the *real* tacile experience of grand organs.
--- --- ---
I begin by dissecting the experience of my Beyers in order to help you choose a suitable headphone for these purposes. After all listening hours I have with these phones I can now make them disappear without trace within a minute, often in just seconds. This is because their inherent sound signature is consistent and predictable during all conditions which make them very easy to learn and adjust to. When the sound signature is learned, it can be discarded entirely since it literally carries no information. Our brains do that automatically for us unless we disturb the process with a picky attitude, focussing on flaws as we see it.
I can say it right away, my first impression of the Beyers in the store was like “beige suede”, a pleasant and non-intrusive sound that packs a punch when appropriate. Perfect! That’s the kind of headphones you need here. The Beyers are not “true” from an absolute point of view - they are slightly emphasizing warm “colours”, for instance. This aspect is exaggerated somewhat by the PA2v2, btw. Further, they are certainly not “impressive” or overly detailed at first glance. None of these properties matter to us in this application, though.
"Predictability" is the most important aspect here as I already proposed, which in this context is about about having very low distortion over the entire spectrum AND have the same tonal signature at all relevant listening volumes. Consistent, predictable behavior: the headphone must not change character during crescendos, for instance. Another important aspect is that the frequency response must be chosen so that it never exceeds the threshold of pain at any point in the spectrum, otherwise you can only use the headphone at too low listening levels for the really interesting experiences to be had, or just be able to use them for short time periods. This is just a question of finding a phone that does not sound painful to you even when playing quite loud for shorter moments, here the Beyer DT250-80 suited me well and passed all tests with flying colours. The sound just becomes larger and larger as you turn up the volume, no painful “knives” anywhere. I get the impression I can trust them never to hurt me, regardless what kind of awful music I ask them to play. Maybe white noise could be used more effectively in the choice process. Remember: this is a subjective ear-headphone matching that simply cannot be made by looking at reviews, it *must* be tried out by you. Maybe you already have a suitable phone, if not it’s about time to start looking!
Why are these aspects so important? It is because no discernable distortion can be allowed to emanate from the planes of the two transducers whose only purpose is to trace pressure fluctuations in the sound flow that passes say, the microphone at a recording studio. I’d like to express it like this: it is much more acceptable to attenuate or filter out some fine details, than for the transducers to introduce even the slightest things that are not part of the signal. Any distortion at these planes will act as a shield that obstructs the original sound-flow from reaching the ears, this is because it introduces artefacts – nonsensical information if you like - that will be the focus of our attention due to its close proximity to our ears. We don’t want distortion in our actual ears either, like what happens to me sometimes at live concerts, hence the necessity of ear-headphone matching. The headphone membranes must move very uniformly to achieve this, ideally like a stiff piston that maintains form integrity also at high amplitudes at all relevant frequencies. This is incredibly difficult to achieve in “real loudspeakers”. It can be done rather well by horn loading, relying on principles of acoustic transformation, or by using large panel-type membranes or an array of smaller ones. Such transducers are highly directional, with almost flat wave-fronts. They are notoriously difficult to use in a normal living-room environment as mentioned earlier, but that’s no problem of ours. It seems to be much easier to achieve the objectives with headphone transducers. Enough with the dissection, I believe many good cans share these properties but this is what you should look for in my humble opinion.
Let’s go on to dissecting an experience instead: the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra just delivered one of the final crescendos of Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3, Op. 78 “Organ”, Michael Murray, Telarc. I just had to revisit that extraordinary place, the Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, FL. The enormous Casavant Frères organ sounds absolutely fabulous, it is an overwhelming full body experience. Through my headphones I can feel that grand organ in my body as if I were there (well, almost). I know this, yet I have never physically been there in “real life”.
What would this *real* experience mean to me, and what would it mean to you? How would it affect you, what would the music do to you? These are the critical questions I believe. To know the answer we must have experienced something of the same calibre, we need points of reference. I have experienced similar performances in real life, several times. We all have our individual ways of experiencing “real” performance music I guess, mine is very “under my skin”, emotional, tangible and tactile. One reason I can come up with is that I played the violin in younger days, starting at the age of 6. The close contact with the instrument made me listen carefully to the subtle ways tones and timbres are formed and controlled. A violin can sound absolutely horrible as you all know, for some reason those small violins for kids generally sound even worse by themselves. The vibrations are transmitted in several ways when playing violin, one of the most painful for a young, skinny violinist is the mechanical transduction via the jaw-bone directly into the young, sensitive ears via the bones of the skull... suffices it to say it is a physical pleasure-pain conditioning process that just gets a little less painful and more pleasurable over time. That’s a theory why small kids learn the basics so quickly. Later on, following the growth of the developing personality, a violin controlled with some measure of skill can express all sorts of emotions and voices. The key to control is still simply to listen very carefully and train like crazy to master the means of manipulation. I finally gave it up because I was too lazy to make it do what I wished.
So what does this gigantic orchestral experience mean to me? I can perhaps give a little glimpse of what an overwhelming tactile experience this is. In the crescendos the organ delivers a flow of velvet black tsunami-sized waves right through where I sit, my body can do nothing but adapt to the waves due to the sheer force. These waves are friendly when coming from slow, single notes. They pass through everything. The glimmering fireworks of brass and silver on the other hand are getting caught by the physical body where it transforms into an organic, wandering pattern of pulsating warm sensations just underneath the skin. A sudden goosebump-attack forms an armoured shield that the sticky waves cannot penetrate. Just after it subsides it is like every note, every change in timbre, every instrument even the faintest little squeak from a flute has a site of correspondence in my body. A tone from an oboe was felt just behind the ribs on the left side, a trumpet in the right knee. Many instruments play around in my arms and chest, some down my spine. Sometimes the tactile touch can be outright painful but this is quite rare with most music. A little pain is necessary to fully appreciate the pleasure me thinks.
The more powerful bass notes are felt also in the floor through my feet and in the couch as I mentioned many times (for most music this is all I care to notice). This organ has some extremely large pipes, allowing the deepest notes to be rendered with perfect clarity and texture on this recording. It is when these notes start interfering with each other and the fine concert hall that very strong emotional content is formed. In this case a dark gray, monumental “gestalt” emerges just to be wiped away a few seconds later by a white benevolent force in the shape of a clean, resounding major chord. My only complaint is that it was sort of an anti-climax but never mind.
My tactile experience is perfectly logical given how sound waves from the objects of reproduction form interference patterns and swinging nodes in space-time. Since our bodies occupy some space and are loaded with pressure sensors all over the place, our neural networks swing with the waves and makes possible for us to decode the experience. The information enter our networks not only at the points of our ears but throughout our entire bodies.
To understand the phantom tactile image created by just headphones is perhaps no more difficult than to understand holography. In the recording situation (cf. “conditioning”); the larger the hologram, the more angles of the reproduced object are possible to see. If you use your whole body as "sonic hologram" when listening you will perceive more aspects of the musical essence. In the reproduction situation (cf. “tactile imaging”), the whole image can be created out of any small piece of the original hologram, still containing all 3D information. The viewing angle will be restricted but we can easily reconstruct in our minds what probably would be shown by the missing pieces, we do this from our memory of objects that are similar to the reproduced object. The membranes of the headphones are pieces of the original "sonic hologram", opening up two tiny gates to the original sound-flow; those parts of the flow that would have hit our ears if they were in the physical location of the microphone membranes. Exactly like when viewing a hologram it possible to reconstruct the information that probably would be transmitted to us through the "missing pieces", in this case the corresponding signals from skin sensors, moderated through internal cavity resonances, etc.
All this assumes of course that we are genuinely interested in exploring the tactile essence of the music in the first place, otherwise there would be no corresponding tactile neural patterns recorded in memory to fill in the missing pieces in the "sonic hologram".
Although the tactile experience seems consistent with existing theories of conditioned experience, the holographic line of thinking contributes with a possibility of making it happen for everyone. Given there is any truth in these theories, in order to reproduce my experience you just have to be more familiar to what “real sounds” of all sorts and amplitudes do to your body and keep that in mind when listening to your headphones. I also believe it is important to choose headphones wisely, judging from my earlier Koss Portapro experiments and the Beyer discussion here. As with holography, if there are dust, dirt and scrathes on the surface of the hologram it will be difficult to get caught in the illusion of a tangible 3D object on the other side.
Thank you for your attention, I hope someone finds this long-winded attempt of explanation useful!
EDIT: clarification of "predictability", the holographic isomorphy, recommendations. Executive summary added...
| Originally Posted by edstrelow There may be some "conditioning" and "association" going on here but there is also the fairly well-studied phenomenon of synesthesia, |
Thank you for the idea, edstrelow! I have now read the paper you referred to, the concept of synesthesia was unknown to me. It is interesting, and although I find the explanations given in the paper strange and far-fetched, I can recognize similarities with “my case”. This is going to be a ridiculously long post but since I’m already knee-deep I might just as well continue. I will also propose some personal views of sound that not everyone will agree with.
“Synesthetes are surprised to discover that others do not perceive words, numbers, sounds, taste, and so forth as they do.”
I must admit, one thing I found a little peculiar since the start of this thread was how few of you that tells about similar ‘tactile headphone experiences’. At first I thought maybe this is just one of those insignificant things that not many people find interesting to notice. Later on, from the insights provided by you, we arrived at a plausible conditioning-based explanation for the illusion. It does not explain why so few can feel it, though. This is because the majority of this community would share this ‘tactile conditioning’ from real experiences of everyday sounds, from thundering waterfalls to chainsaws - well, everyone that cares to enter the real world once in a while. Also, I’m not exactly alone in enjoying full-sized live music experiences.
Yes, I’m surprised that so few Head-fiers share this tactile experience. I don’t believe the phenomenon of synesthesia is applicable in this case though, and I’ll try to explain why.
--- --- ---
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: you will never experience the tactile feel of a grand organ through headphones if you forgot to (or never cared to) explore the *real* tacile experience of grand organs.
--- --- ---
I begin by dissecting the experience of my Beyers in order to help you choose a suitable headphone for these purposes. After all listening hours I have with these phones I can now make them disappear without trace within a minute, often in just seconds. This is because their inherent sound signature is consistent and predictable during all conditions which make them very easy to learn and adjust to. When the sound signature is learned, it can be discarded entirely since it literally carries no information. Our brains do that automatically for us unless we disturb the process with a picky attitude, focussing on flaws as we see it.
I can say it right away, my first impression of the Beyers in the store was like “beige suede”, a pleasant and non-intrusive sound that packs a punch when appropriate. Perfect! That’s the kind of headphones you need here. The Beyers are not “true” from an absolute point of view - they are slightly emphasizing warm “colours”, for instance. This aspect is exaggerated somewhat by the PA2v2, btw. Further, they are certainly not “impressive” or overly detailed at first glance. None of these properties matter to us in this application, though.
"Predictability" is the most important aspect here as I already proposed, which in this context is about about having very low distortion over the entire spectrum AND have the same tonal signature at all relevant listening volumes. Consistent, predictable behavior: the headphone must not change character during crescendos, for instance. Another important aspect is that the frequency response must be chosen so that it never exceeds the threshold of pain at any point in the spectrum, otherwise you can only use the headphone at too low listening levels for the really interesting experiences to be had, or just be able to use them for short time periods. This is just a question of finding a phone that does not sound painful to you even when playing quite loud for shorter moments, here the Beyer DT250-80 suited me well and passed all tests with flying colours. The sound just becomes larger and larger as you turn up the volume, no painful “knives” anywhere. I get the impression I can trust them never to hurt me, regardless what kind of awful music I ask them to play. Maybe white noise could be used more effectively in the choice process. Remember: this is a subjective ear-headphone matching that simply cannot be made by looking at reviews, it *must* be tried out by you. Maybe you already have a suitable phone, if not it’s about time to start looking!
Why are these aspects so important? It is because no discernable distortion can be allowed to emanate from the planes of the two transducers whose only purpose is to trace pressure fluctuations in the sound flow that passes say, the microphone at a recording studio. I’d like to express it like this: it is much more acceptable to attenuate or filter out some fine details, than for the transducers to introduce even the slightest things that are not part of the signal. Any distortion at these planes will act as a shield that obstructs the original sound-flow from reaching the ears, this is because it introduces artefacts – nonsensical information if you like - that will be the focus of our attention due to its close proximity to our ears. We don’t want distortion in our actual ears either, like what happens to me sometimes at live concerts, hence the necessity of ear-headphone matching. The headphone membranes must move very uniformly to achieve this, ideally like a stiff piston that maintains form integrity also at high amplitudes at all relevant frequencies. This is incredibly difficult to achieve in “real loudspeakers”. It can be done rather well by horn loading, relying on principles of acoustic transformation, or by using large panel-type membranes or an array of smaller ones. Such transducers are highly directional, with almost flat wave-fronts. They are notoriously difficult to use in a normal living-room environment as mentioned earlier, but that’s no problem of ours. It seems to be much easier to achieve the objectives with headphone transducers. Enough with the dissection, I believe many good cans share these properties but this is what you should look for in my humble opinion.
Let’s go on to dissecting an experience instead: the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra just delivered one of the final crescendos of Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3, Op. 78 “Organ”, Michael Murray, Telarc. I just had to revisit that extraordinary place, the Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, FL. The enormous Casavant Frères organ sounds absolutely fabulous, it is an overwhelming full body experience. Through my headphones I can feel that grand organ in my body as if I were there (well, almost). I know this, yet I have never physically been there in “real life”.
What would this *real* experience mean to me, and what would it mean to you? How would it affect you, what would the music do to you? These are the critical questions I believe. To know the answer we must have experienced something of the same calibre, we need points of reference. I have experienced similar performances in real life, several times. We all have our individual ways of experiencing “real” performance music I guess, mine is very “under my skin”, emotional, tangible and tactile. One reason I can come up with is that I played the violin in younger days, starting at the age of 6. The close contact with the instrument made me listen carefully to the subtle ways tones and timbres are formed and controlled. A violin can sound absolutely horrible as you all know, for some reason those small violins for kids generally sound even worse by themselves. The vibrations are transmitted in several ways when playing violin, one of the most painful for a young, skinny violinist is the mechanical transduction via the jaw-bone directly into the young, sensitive ears via the bones of the skull... suffices it to say it is a physical pleasure-pain conditioning process that just gets a little less painful and more pleasurable over time. That’s a theory why small kids learn the basics so quickly. Later on, following the growth of the developing personality, a violin controlled with some measure of skill can express all sorts of emotions and voices. The key to control is still simply to listen very carefully and train like crazy to master the means of manipulation. I finally gave it up because I was too lazy to make it do what I wished.
So what does this gigantic orchestral experience mean to me? I can perhaps give a little glimpse of what an overwhelming tactile experience this is. In the crescendos the organ delivers a flow of velvet black tsunami-sized waves right through where I sit, my body can do nothing but adapt to the waves due to the sheer force. These waves are friendly when coming from slow, single notes. They pass through everything. The glimmering fireworks of brass and silver on the other hand are getting caught by the physical body where it transforms into an organic, wandering pattern of pulsating warm sensations just underneath the skin. A sudden goosebump-attack forms an armoured shield that the sticky waves cannot penetrate. Just after it subsides it is like every note, every change in timbre, every instrument even the faintest little squeak from a flute has a site of correspondence in my body. A tone from an oboe was felt just behind the ribs on the left side, a trumpet in the right knee. Many instruments play around in my arms and chest, some down my spine. Sometimes the tactile touch can be outright painful but this is quite rare with most music. A little pain is necessary to fully appreciate the pleasure me thinks.
The more powerful bass notes are felt also in the floor through my feet and in the couch as I mentioned many times (for most music this is all I care to notice). This organ has some extremely large pipes, allowing the deepest notes to be rendered with perfect clarity and texture on this recording. It is when these notes start interfering with each other and the fine concert hall that very strong emotional content is formed. In this case a dark gray, monumental “gestalt” emerges just to be wiped away a few seconds later by a white benevolent force in the shape of a clean, resounding major chord. My only complaint is that it was sort of an anti-climax but never mind.
My tactile experience is perfectly logical given how sound waves from the objects of reproduction form interference patterns and swinging nodes in space-time. Since our bodies occupy some space and are loaded with pressure sensors all over the place, our neural networks swing with the waves and makes possible for us to decode the experience. The information enter our networks not only at the points of our ears but throughout our entire bodies.
To understand the phantom tactile image created by just headphones is perhaps no more difficult than to understand holography. In the recording situation (cf. “conditioning”); the larger the hologram, the more angles of the reproduced object are possible to see. If you use your whole body as "sonic hologram" when listening you will perceive more aspects of the musical essence. In the reproduction situation (cf. “tactile imaging”), the whole image can be created out of any small piece of the original hologram, still containing all 3D information. The viewing angle will be restricted but we can easily reconstruct in our minds what probably would be shown by the missing pieces, we do this from our memory of objects that are similar to the reproduced object. The membranes of the headphones are pieces of the original "sonic hologram", opening up two tiny gates to the original sound-flow; those parts of the flow that would have hit our ears if they were in the physical location of the microphone membranes. Exactly like when viewing a hologram it possible to reconstruct the information that probably would be transmitted to us through the "missing pieces", in this case the corresponding signals from skin sensors, moderated through internal cavity resonances, etc.
All this assumes of course that we are genuinely interested in exploring the tactile essence of the music in the first place, otherwise there would be no corresponding tactile neural patterns recorded in memory to fill in the missing pieces in the "sonic hologram".
Although the tactile experience seems consistent with existing theories of conditioned experience, the holographic line of thinking contributes with a possibility of making it happen for everyone. Given there is any truth in these theories, in order to reproduce my experience you just have to be more familiar to what “real sounds” of all sorts and amplitudes do to your body and keep that in mind when listening to your headphones. I also believe it is important to choose headphones wisely, judging from my earlier Koss Portapro experiments and the Beyer discussion here. As with holography, if there are dust, dirt and scrathes on the surface of the hologram it will be difficult to get caught in the illusion of a tangible 3D object on the other side.
Thank you for your attention, I hope someone finds this long-winded attempt of explanation useful!
EDIT: clarification of "predictability", the holographic isomorphy, recommendations. Executive summary added...
