Psychoacoustics (The Perception of Music)

0:00 Music Appreciation. What's good, everybody, welcome to Love Music More, where hopefully afterwards you'll love music a little bit more.This episode I want to talk to you about some kind of nitty gritty stuff that I've been really getting into.

0:25 And I think we'll help the way that you, you know, think of the recording engineers craft, the mixes, the music that you have out there,the different speakers and headphones and stuff that you use and find out why stuff sounds so different in different places and why some song sound louder than others.

0:43 So this is a bit of a rabbit hole that I went on because I've been finding that some of the tunes that I put on Spotify sound louder than some of the other tunesor you listen to some other songs on a playlist and it gets to your song and now your song sounds really good or next to the other songs it doesn't sound as good.It's trying to figure out the reasons why.

1:03 At first the stuff that I wanted to do, the stuff that I reached for were my instruments.So checking my math, seeing like, okay, what are the different integrated loudness signals?Basically, like, how does the computer perceive this to be versus other songs?And the computer actually perceived it to be just about as loud.But my ears didn't. And so that led me on this rabbit hole of psycho acoustics.

1:29 And I want to let you guys in on it because it's a really interesting subject and it reveals something I think about music making in general.So if you picture a recording studio, there's like all the meters and all the knobs and stuff and those meters are kind of like how a helicopter pilot flies and they have all their instruments.And they're able to check their altitude and all this kind of stuff.

1:56 That's kind of similar to what we've got going on with all of our meters.So you're in the green, you're good, you're in the yellow.That's kind of actually nice to be bouncing in between the green and the yellow.But then when you jump up and you hit the red, if you're on digital gear, that generally creates clipping.

2:12 So what clipping is, is you can picture a sine wave up and down, up and down, like a slinky going up and down.Clipping is where these waves no longer are able to freely move.They hit a brick wall up top and at bottom.And so instead of being this smooth S that goes on forever, it ends up being a square block that kind of hits both ends and gets clipped off.

2:38 And there are a bunch of different ways this ends up happening.And that's one of the reasons why I like saturation so much in distortion so much because there are musical ways to add clipping that are typically found on pieces of analog gear.So if you look at a recording studio from the 60s or 70s or whatever, you'll see a lot of stuff pushing into that red area.

3:01 And what they're actually doing is they're trying to introduce that overloaded sound.But because it's in the analog space rather than the digital space, it is adding character.It isn't quite just doing a square.It is clipping off certain parts and accentuating certain parts and adding different harmonics and distortion.Basically like boosting up some pleasant frequencies.But what makes a pleasant frequency?

3:28 A lot of that goes back to the psychoacoustics.So when I speak, when I play an instrument all this kind of stuff, it's never just one individual note.There are a series of harmonic frequencies.And one of the things that sounds really good is to boost up that second and third order harmonics.

3:46 So the stuff that isn't just the primary sound, it isn't the C note or whatever, it's the stuff that resonates above that note.If that doesn't make sense, you can kind of think of like why does a saxophone sound different from a clarinet sound different from a violin sound different from a guitar.They can all play the same note.That's a harmonic series, at least in large part.

4:11 That is what is differentiating those sound sources.So that analog stuff when you're pushing it into the red is actually hyping up the stuff that makes that that.So like when you saturate a high hat, the extra frequencies that are so, quote unquote, high hat sounding come out.

4:34 And so it goes, wow, that's really popping out of the speakers. That's really accentuating that.That's why I love saturation so much.And that's why I think early digital music sounds so bad is that it misses that feeling of like the juice, the magic, the mojo, the psychoacoustic stuff.

4:54 If you just record something digitally, like purely digitally and you're not enhancing anything, it sounds sterile and flat because it's artificial.And also it's lacking the thing that makes that that that we got so used to overloading analog gear.So part of that is personal preference, but I also think part of it's just the way that our ears are made.

5:15 If you flatten something out, it can sound very brittle and fragile and digital.But the magic of where digital is gone is that it's been able to take the lessons from analog and apply it mathematically.So then we're kind of getting the best of both worlds. We have the flexibility to be able to just do this on a laptop in a hotel room, wherever.

5:37 Without having to be in a quarter million dollar, million dollar studio, whatever you can just do it there.But you can replicate that same sound. It doesn't end up sounding so brittle and fragile.Not to say that there aren't moments where that's really cool. I actually sometimes like digital sounding stuff.But it's all about having the tools in your toolkit.

5:58 So to go back around, when we're looking at loudness versus perceived loudness, hitting the red and digital, hitting the red and analog is a very good analog to that type of consideration.So if I am metering really high, you would assume, oh, it's a really loud sound. That's not necessarily the case.

6:23 I have had some things like synthesized strings, a Solina string patch that cuts through the mix like nobody's business.

6:32 And it's barely even metering. It's just this little tiny green bar. But it is so loud because it is pure, concentrated, like 3,500 hertz, 3.5 kilohertz, which is the present part of voices.

6:53 When people get older, they tend to lose their ability to hear higher and higher frequencies.So they lose the ability to hear like sibilance, which is up in seven-ish kilohertz, so 7,000 hertz.That kind of sound starts to degrade as you get older. So it makes it harder to be able to perceive what people are saying.

7:15 And also that's part of the reason why old people sometimes mix too bright because they don't hear it anymore.So it's like the way that the ear is tuned in the same way that like a microphone is tuned or a speaker is tuned or a room is tuned is its own sort of parameter.

7:36 So you could imagine an alien that has very different ears hearing things and thinking that everything we mix sounds like crap to them because say that they're evolved to hear things.So they think that our mixes are too boomy because that's what they prefer.

7:59 But just an example is like the more human voice and instrument sounds, usually the louder it ends up being perceived regardless of how loud it's metering.Another thing is metering for the entire mix. So that's when like mastering kind of gets involved.

8:18 And that was what I was really alluding to in my first kind of story was talking about checking out different songs on the same playlist and saying, why is this one sound louder?Why is that one sound quieter?And a lot of that is not necessarily the way that Spotify is processing and some of it is just the way that you hear it.So mid information can make things sound louder presence can make things sound louder.

8:44 Some modern mixes and it's all song by song basis are like low like have less mid.They have a rounded presence less mid really loud bass and some airiness.And those are actually going to sound quieter unless you have a big subwoofer or something like that in comparison to other ones because it's a less full frequency spectrum.

9:09 You're instead are kind of creating room for the low end to eat up some of that space.One of my mixing mentors I've talked about this on the pop before talked about mixes being like a balloon.You only have so much space inside of that balloon and if you're going to put a big old base inside of that balloon, everything else is going to get a little bit smaller.

9:29 And that happens to be kind of my preference as a bass player and as somebody that you know just is into kick drums and live sounding stuff, that's my preference.That was not the preference before in you know 70s whatever because it took up so much room.You want the guitars to sound really big and a lot of my music the guitars don't sound very big on purpose.

9:52 I'm leaving room for the voice I'm leaving room for the kick and the bass to really speak and I like to think of mixing in general is kind of a conversation between the rhythm and the vocalist and everything else is kind of ornamentation.

10:09 But that ends up making some mixes sound quieter in comparison unless you're on the right sound system, which is an interesting trade off you know.But at the same time it's all preference right and that's what that's what we like can really take from the cycle acoustics kind of thing is.

10:29 We all have our own ears we all have our own ways of perceiving like you're talking about old people like they hear differently.And you want to create a mix that suits your vision your vision of what that music is supposed to be.And other people on their other end they can adjust for it you know is it that bad for somebody to turn it up a little bit.

10:51 And if they do turn it up guess what like the mix that was quote unquote quieter might end up sounding a lot better because it has more dynamics or has more low end or whatever.Same same get a deal of like you have if you're losing that sibilance that that seven K.You know boosted on your EQ at home or on your car or whatever or get get headphones that have more presence.

11:16 There's a reason why headphone companies put out these specs of like here's the EQ curve of a headphone or here's the EQ curve of a speaker.And there's some really cool software to I don't actually like it that much because I played with it and kind of.I don't know it doesn't give me the results I'm looking for but there's some cool stuff that tries to account for the EQ curve to flatten it out to make it so that.

11:42 Now you're in you know Capitol Records listening to it even though you're wearing your headphones.It's kind of it's kind of gimmicky I sometimes use it to check but I think that the real deal is to learn your ears and to learn your gear and then be able to account for if it sounds like this on this it'll sound like that in another place.

12:06 And that's when you really know your own instincts and you also really know your own like headphones and stuff.It's like I understand where my headphones lack and where they they do a good job but that's only because I've worked on them so much.

12:21 And it's it's a matter of I don't know of perception and preference rather than prescription or like like looking at the perfect plugin that's going to tell me how everything's supposed to go because in the end.The computer doesn't know because the computer's not listening to it.

12:43 They're getting better at that kind of stuff but you know it's it ultimately is passing through your ears and you're having to make a judgment call.So yeah that's that's kind of it. One other kind of fun thing that I picked up on that journey was also talking about how headphone listening and headphone mixing is essentially binaural.

13:02 So binaural meaning you know isolated 360 because you have speakers going directly in your ear with pretty good separation between the two if you don't have any bleed.And I thought that was an interesting way to look at it. That's that's something that some of these plugin companies are messing with to try to create artificial spill between your ears.

13:23 So then even though you're wearing you know headphones that are one speaker on one ear one speaker on the other.So you can hear it as though you know the right speaker is bleeding into your left ear and the left speaker is bleeding into your right ear as a wood.If you were listening into a car or in an actual environment that wasn't binaural.

13:42 There's some cool plugins to like like can opener studio that I've played with like it but I like I don't need it because I know my headphones again.But the other thing that I would super recommend is one called Pana by Klevgrand.It's basically it's like a panning tool. Panning is where you like select how much is in your right ear or your left ear.

14:03 But it's panning in a way that spills. So like instead of panning it hard left.So it's only in your left ear and there's 0% in your right. If you listen to like some early stereo stuff.You know the whole drum kit is over in your left ear and all the vocals are over in your right ear.If you take off one headphone you can't even know what the song is anymore.

14:26 It tries to account for that and it doesn't a really cool way and I'm using that on a bunch of my stuff just because feels like a more natural way to pan.It's like you you have that instrument over in this side of the room.And so because it's over in this side of the room your right ear is going to hear a little bit of it.It's not like you have a plexiglass shield in between your left and right ear.

14:49 If somebody was playing guitar for you over on your left side, your right side would perceive it a little bit.And so it's like playing with those, you know, the interplay between sterile, artificial and realistic.And being able to switch in between the two, having the tools, recognizing it.Knowing when you want to go more digital, when you want to go more analog, when you want to make things sound louder.

15:12 Or make things sound the way you want it to sound.So it was a fun little rabbit hole and I wanted to share kind of the results of my research there.I'm going to be expanding on this with a really cool podcast.We're going to talk about video game audio, composing for video games, creating immersive environments.

15:31 And so I thought having a conversation like this, a conversation is so little like we, like this, would set up that conversation pretty well.So anyway, hope you enjoyed the pod.There's a bunch more for you to check out in the history.I think all that's pretty evergreen, so go through.Super fun.And if you'd like to hear my music, go to scoobertdoobert.pizza, www.scoobertdoobert.pizza.

15:55 And, you know, like subscribe the whole thing.So the other people can find the pod. Please share it with people so that more people can love music more.And we can keep doing this, find more guests, and do all that good stuff.Thanks so much for listening.Talk to you later.Bye.