The Art of Recording Chapter 8

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All people in the audio industry are required to analyze sound. The process of carefully evaluating sound, in one context or another, is an integral part of all positions in the audio industry. Sound must be evaluated and analyzed to perceive and evaluate all aspects of audio. Whether the aspects of audio are equipment functions or are media productions; are music productions or are the technical quality of a sequence of test tones; sound is being analyzed by the listener.

The evaluation of sound is even performed by the final consumers of the audio industry: the home listener will evaluate sound to understand the material of the production, and to judge the quality of their playback system.

It is necessary for all people related to the audio industry to be accurate and consistent in their evaluations of the quality and content of sound and audio.

The previous experience, knowledge, cultural conditioning, and expectations of the listener have a direct impact on the level of proficiency at which the listener is able to evaluate sound. With increased experience in evaluating sound comes increased skill and accuracy, and a new set of factors influencing conditioning and expectations. The process of evaluating sound can be learned and greatly refined.

It should be a primary objective of all people in the audio industry to be more sensitive and reliable in their evaluations of sound.

Nearly all of the sound material evaluated by people in audio is not notated. The sounds are not accompanied by written representations (such as a musical score) to assist the listener in understanding, recognizing or evaluating the material being heard. Furthermore, no language exists to assist people in audio in their communications "about" sound. In nearly all facets of audio, sounds do not co-exist in another form that would allow the other senses, or our thought processes of conceptualization, to assist our hearing experience during the evaluation of sound.

The process of evaluating sound has been devised to provide a means for evaluating sound in its many forms and uses, and to provide a vehicle whereby meaningful information about sound may be communicated. Critical listening and analytical listening processes are very similar, and are performed side-by-side; the critical listening process describes the perceived physical states of the sound material out of applications contexts, and the analytical listening process describing the perceived physical states of the sound material within the context of the individual musical composition.

Functions of Sound Evaluation

Recording engineers and producers, obviously, must have well developed listening skills, as the evaluation of sound is one of the most important functions to their job activity. This need for highly refined skills obviously holds true for composers and other musicians, especially those involved in the audio recording processes.

Whenever someone listens to a sound, whether the person is listening to a piece of music for the performance of an artistic idea, listening to the sound qualities of a particular piece of audio equipment, or is listening to the effectiveness of the foley sounds in a motion picture sound track, an evaluation process is taking place.

In fact, as many functions for sound evaluation exist, as there are job functions within the multitude of positions in the audio industry, and within the many media applications we have found for audio. These many functions for sound evaluation necessitate a method for the evaluation of sound that can easily be transferred to a variety of contexts, and yet easily yield meaningful and significant information. The method must transfer between musical contexts and abstract, critical listening applications.

The evaluation process is vital to correctly collecting and interpreting information about the sound object or sound event, and the process is required of the technical people in the industry as well as the artistic. All people in audio work directly with some aspect of sound. The aspects of sound that they work with might be vastly different, yet they must communicate directly and accurately.

As we have seen in Chapter 3 above, our perception of the same material will yield different information to different listeners (or to the same listener on different listenings) depending on: (1) the type of information the listener is trying to determine from the specific listening process, (2) the listener's past experiences and knowledge (3) the focus of the listener, (4) the level of attentiveness of the listener, and (5) the social-cultural conditioning of the listener.