Having gone through a wave of bedroom recording, phone performances(youtube etc.), modular synths, and finally pandemic, we are overdue for a folk/indie/live music wave.
This doesn't contradict Petzold's glee for yt, bc his yt is a yearning for less edited performances.
I have been learning classical guitar lately, and in looking for modern composers I discovered Andrew York (no small name, but I hadn't heard of him before). I watched/listened to his full unedited 1991 performance[1] and it was a really captivating experience, especially as a new student to the instrument. He tunes the instrument on-stage, including changing tunings entirely; discusses some of the pieces; the long pauses between pieces are captured. All stuff Mr Petzold describes. Definitely a different experience from listening to an album, and I look forward to doing more of it.
As a complete aside, Petzold's "Code" book is one of the best computing books I've ever read, and totally informed my career after I read it in high school.
For years I was all about live recordings of music, but with youtube there's a scad of amazing videos of music being played. It makes all the difference in the world and I don't care that the audio quality is worse. I haven't listened to music that wasn't a video recording of a live performance for some time.
One implication might be heavy use of youtube_dl since the copyright elves are going to continue to bring their attention to the matter.
A decade ago, I used to go to a local jazz club, ask the performers if they are ok with me recording their performance for my personal use, and if they were ok, I took out my trusty Zoom H4n, put it on a stand, and recorded away. On a good day, I could use an additional pair of Samson C1 mics as well.
The musicians I met there were a friendly bunch, and usually were totally ok, provided I sent them a copy, too.
I cherish these recordings a lot to this day. Not only because I was 10 years younger back then, although that too, but also because the performance sounded more authentic precisely because it wasn't overproduced, thoroughly compressed, denoised, and equalized to hell. There are people talking in the background, the floor boards may squeak sometimes, and it's a very immersive experience.
I like hearing the air hissing quietly into the microphones. When it's not there, the sound is uncanny. When it's there but there's a lot of editing, you can hear it change, and that's uncanny too. When it had been there and got subsequently removed, often a noticeable portion of "signal" is removed too, and the sound becomes very "artificial".
Sometimes I like a good studio recording, too. It's just that I like it for different things: mostly it's to hear what the musicians really intended to convey, provided, of course, that the album had been mastered to their preferences.
Totally agree. I really enjoy the Wall of Sound Grateful Dead recordings for this. Especially ones recorded at what sounds like a chilled daytime fate or festival. I find the ambient sounds in between songs and sets very relaxing.
I had an idea that I wanted to write a script to pull out and stitch together all of the ambient sound from their recordings I find it so relaxing. If it's not been done already by someone.
I thought this was going to be about adding spatial audio processing [1] to recorded music. One of the reasons recorded music is uncanny is that the act of listening to something with stereo channels piped directly into your ears is vastly different than listening to the same music in a room as it is affected by the room's dynamics.
There is a lot of work being done in VR research labs to simulate realistic audio by using the correct transfer function when playing the audio track. If done properly, listening to prerecorded audio of a concert would be indistinguishable from a live concert. But doing it correctly requires dynamically adapting the audio stream for the user's head & ear shape and ear position with respect to the audio source.
Synthetic spatial audio that passes a Turing test has been done in the lab but we probably won't see it in consumer devices for a few more years. VR headsets and Airpods are slowly getting there, but they don't simulate the user's ears.
> listening to prerecorded audio of a concert would be indistinguishable from a live concert
It seems to me this would be really dependent on the type of music and the size of the venue.
In a large percentage of the bigger shows I've been to, the sound was honestly pretty awful. That's not really what I was there for. I was there to see what the artist(s) could do unedited in real time, in person, and to be (somewhat) physically near them when it happened. It's a different skillset from what they do in recordings.
At some point in the 80's or 90's I read a book by someone who was at AT&T and into simulating room dynamics.
One thing I remember is that, according to him, a large amount of classical music sounds much better when the transfer function approximates a relatively tall, narrow room (like a cathedral) than when it approximates a relatively short, wide room (like a modern concert hall).
(note that construction spans, lighting, and ventilation, all conspire to make historical rooms taller and narrower than our typical rooms)
Well I don't know what the writer's exact reasoning is, but there are few factors for why larger rooms are favorable:
1) Room modes. Small rooms are far more destructive because they feature hot-spots where the sound waves (especially the low end) are either cancelled out or reinforced in a way that makes them too loud. Large ceilings and lots of the depth to the room give the low frequencies space to propagate completely and a more even frequency response that isn't lumpy or lacking when you stand in certain parts of the room.
2) Reverberation. Pretty obvious, but the average length of the echoes/reverberant tail increase as the room gets bigger. This is gives an ambient quality to the sound that is well suited to orchestral ensembles. You could probably argue that the history of orchestral composition grew in tandem with this quality and informed the choices that were made or play best with the qualities of a room large enough to house an orchestra and audience. That said, highly percussive music might be muddied or hard to articulate cleanly if it's fighting against a massive reverb tail in a cathedral.
I don’t see why it has to be one or the other. Both live and studio albums have their quirks and benefits.
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with live jazz. Every Friday and Saturday, I’ve been at a local joint to catch a few sets. Hearing good players live makes me appreciate older albums even more.
There are great live albums too like Full House by Wes Montgomery or After Hours by Charlie Christian & Dizzy Gillespie. Some of them even have video from live concerts in the ~60s.
I suppose it’s different with jazz albums as they’re not typically overengineered or note perfect anyways. The main issue is accurate reproduction; it obviously doesn’t sound like real life... The upright bass in particular tends to sound quite different. On the other hand, live music has lots of people talking in the background except on special nights where everyone seems to shut up and listen.
But these albums are a way of connecting as far back as the 30s and they’re crucial for learning the tradition & origins of modern jazz. Depending on your setup they can still sound quite good.
If you want to disembowel music, I would suggest Izotope RX-8. If you like to sample music, this is pretty much as close to the dream software as I could expect is possible. Love a break but it has those pesky vocals? Remove them. Love the drums at a section but its got some annoying accompaniment? Solo the drums. Want to just tweak the mix? that is possible too.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music trying to figure out how to write good songs recently, and I find that it really does help to watch the musicians play all together. If you listen to the recorded tracks you’ll probably hear 5 guitars overdubbed in a band with 3 people. But seeing them live, you see the drummer tap the sticks together, 1, 2, 3, 4, then you see the keyboard player put his hands down, and you see someone playing a strat, clean, chords, and someone else come in on the bass- it just makes it a lot easier to hear how they arranged everything and what they’re doing. More enjoyable too. Studio tricks are ok but there is magic in seeing how those sounds are made.
This doesn't contradict Petzold's glee for yt, bc his yt is a yearning for less edited performances.
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