What harm has low-fidelity done to mankind?

[gregorio]

Quote:

Originally Posted by haloxt /img/forum/go_quote.gif Uncle Erik, I just used tv as an example, it applies to anything utilizing artificial sound reproduction. My theory is that limitations of recording and reproduction can have a cumulative effect (I don't pretend to know in what degree) on not just the development of language, but also culture, behavior, and, as you well illustrated, music.

Just imagine how much better a lossless teenager will sound compared to an MP3 teenager!!

I have had some experience of hiloxt's phenomenon though. I recently had to switch listening exclusively to 8bit recordings because I was so used to 24bit recordings that I was actually talking at 144dB and all my friends' ears started to bleed whenever I spoke to them. However, since I upgraded my digital cable it's noticeable that my speech no longer has any jitter artifacts.

G

 

[Sonic Atrocity]

Hahahahahah I searched "fidelity" and this thread came up. This is hilarious.

 

[Willakan]

Indeed. This is a thread worth resurrecting - it didn't make my day, but it certainly perked up my morning.

 

[haloxt]

Latin word for intelligence is sensatus. What is consciousness if not our ability to sense and interpret? More research has been done on the effect on the mind and brain from artificial visual stimuli than on artificial auditory stimuli, which I think is silly. Humans learn social behavior more through sound than sight, people who are blind have less difficulty participating in society than people who are deaf. The impact of auditory media may have a much greater effect on the mind and humans than visual media. You may not think the changes in sounds we hear are important, but I think it is as artificial as the way Americans spend 90% of their lives indoor, and it's worth looking into the effects it has on humans. Or maybe we should just turn a blind eye to everything as usual as our mental institutions get crowded with epidemic levels of fallout as we continue on our slippery slope called "human progress".

 

[Sonic Atrocity]

Quote:

Even for kids today there is something called real life, in glorious, uncompressed error-free analogue hi-end surround. So this seems no cause for alarm to me.

Can I please put this post in my signature with your name next to it? Most hilarious comment on head-fi ever hahahaa.

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

More research has been done on the effect on the mind and brain from artificial visual stimuli than on artificial auditory stimuli, which I think is silly. Humans learn social behavior more through sound than sight, people who are blind have less difficulty participating in society than people who are deaf. The impact of auditory media may have a much greater effect on the mind and humans than visual media.

Sources please.

 

[khaos974]

Wait, what a silly idea on several aspects.
 
The first point is identifying what aspect of human language has been affect by low fidelity: vocabulary, syntax, grammar? None of them seem likely, they only require us to understand spoken words to assimilate, and even old TVs with cheap speakers are enough for us to recognize the words. So the only aspect of language that could have been affect is clarity of elocution.
 
But our elocution, its clarity and its tone is depends on how we modulate our vocal chords, and we do not simply reproduce what we hear. As a matter of fact, our own voice is distorted compared to when other people hear it (some bone conduction is involved); we also don't directly imitate other people's voices we we speak, otherwise we would be crazy just because of the adaptation needed for the switch between male/falme/old/young voices. The same happens with low-fi, only the general intonations and stresses are important, the details of the spoken voice are not, they are just other voices to us, the distortion involved via low-fi is far less than the real difference between a male and female voice, or the one between a Texan and a New-Yorker.
 
Finally, the idea that TV alone impact our elocution is silly, the first contact with language children have is with their parents and close relatives, then comes the voices of their teacher and other kids. Of course, TV also plays a role, but TV is a non interactive experience, and interactive experiences requires a greater attention from kids.

 

[liamstrain]

It should be noted that silver in their braces will make them sound brighter and better resolved.

 

[haloxt]

Quote:

Sources please.

Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf by Oliver Sacks
 
I should've known better than to post such a topic on a forum, but I couldn't help myself, because I also find such discussions hilarious, but I'm laughing at the vale of tears of a world where people rationalize everything with the slightest unpleasant implications away. Those of you who keep claiming we learn more from other people than tv, try looking up statistics on how much tv people watch nowadays. I'm also sure all these video games about putting holes in people will have no effect on people as well, because parents teach their children more than video games right?

 

[Edoardo]

Before I bullshiit, is this thread about music listening, linguistics, or the death of Western culture?

 

[haloxt]

This thread is about people's inability to give new ideas a fair chance. I personally believe what I'm suggesting is true, and worthy of consideration, but I don't claim to know exactly to what degree or with what implications. I'm a little ticked at the kind of unscientific dismissals I've read, and can't help but see how this is the same exact kind of bias which allows people to be irrational about all other matters of life.

 

[nikongod]

 
Quote:

Before I bullshiit, is this thread about music listening, linguistics, or the death of Western culture?
 

Not only the death of western culture, but that many people seem to embrace it. 

 

[firev1]

I know this thread is kinda expired, but lets revive it a bit more by getting it on track.
 
I think that low-fi for one is not all that bad, ever since the start of low-fi, humankind has been able to hear acts from all around the world and not just hear about them. Surely, not in its full fidelity but the cultural exchange, and the fact that you don't really need hi-fi songs for people to like them. Also, because of the Ipod/MP3 gen and Beats, we see a lot more youngsters join the hobby and give the audio as a whole, benefit from it. I think the audio industry/ community(which is precisely why hi-fi forums exist) needs to better educate the masses by showing off the more affordable hi-fi/mid-fi audio.
 
That being said, most of us probably live in noisy cities, as a whole, if theres anything that has been really negative to our hearing or listening skills, it is this era we have been living in. 
  

 

[fatcat28037]

Quote:

Before I bullshiit, is this thread about music listening, linguistics, or the death of Western culture?

Yes.
 

 

[Edoardo]

Quote:

This thread is about people's inability to give new ideas a fair chance. I personally believe what I'm suggesting is true, and worthy of consideration, but I don't claim to know exactly to what degree or with what implications. I'm a little ticked at the kind of unscientific dismissals I've read, and can't help but see how this is the same exact kind of bias which allows people to be irrational about all other matters of life.

Well, first of all, I must thank you because this is the most interesting thread I've come through here on Head-Fi since I joined.
 
I've always been very interested in what we could call here the current low-fi lifestyle the most are Westerns leading, from junk food to disco commercial music.
With the wealth and the potential they have, these decades will be remembered as the biggest cultural waste in human history.
 
There is this massive, collective lack of concentration on anything. Lack of concentration leads to lack of education, lack of culture, and finally lack of taste.
Few people are able to distinguish objective quality, or value excellence when they see it. 
Excellence is underrated in favour of mediocrity
 
 
Why are visual stimuli privileged over the acoustic ones?
 
Music is the queen of the Arts. It's the most formal and ancient, and though the most don't get it, a musical composition can have many layers of meaning as any other artistic composition!
 
But it's also the one which needs more study and attention not only to achieve good results, but also to appreciate them.
That's why quality in music is the most "unpopular", or else less "immediately" understandable and explainable, and that's why when it comes to music folks do not speak anymore in terms on objective quality, but everything turns into poor speech, sentences such as "I like it" "I don't like it", "It's just an opinion", "music it's fun" "You don't have to fatigue to play music", "the important thing is to have fun!", and such commonplaces
 
I've tried to speak about this concept also in an older thread 

 
 
 
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I just look for something beautiful and pleasant.
 
Beautiful things must be saught-after to be pleasant, especially in music: from the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.
 
A saught-after Form needs study.
 
Why is there not a painting talent-show, or a sculpture one???
 
Now what if I started to gain a lot of money from my stickman drawings?
 
 

 
 
Yelling out, "hey, Leonardo Da Vinci is boring!"
 
And what if I figured on the newspapers as one of the greatest drawers of the 21st century?
 
 
And then what if someone like Mr. Bigshot asked me... "Can you also draw like this?"...
 

 
 
 
....And I replied "hey man, you don't really need to know how to handle a pencil to say you can draw! drawing is fun!"
 
 
 
This is EXACTLY what's happening with music today!
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