Mind Stretchers
I yield. You guys have fed my papers to the junkyard dog until they are no
longer recognizable. I would just leave you with one final thought on audio.
My biggest point is that once both ears are free to hear your entire
room/speaker situation, then they can easily hear the spatial presentation
in front of them. If it is a boombox, you can tell the sound is coming from
that little box in front of you, no matter what was recorded. If it is a car
stereo, you usually hear some stereo image coming from, or forming itself
over, a certain portion of your dashboard or windshield. If it is a
sophisticated home system, you can hear those aspects that I described at
the beginning. In other words, the process changes the spatial
characteristics of the recorded original to those of the presentation in
front of you. So the idea is to study those characteristics and make them
closer to the live situation by manipulating The Big Three. Making an image
model drawing gives a more visual representation of what you are hearing,
and leads to more realistic reproduction if you model the room/speaker
situation after the original.
A PHOTOGRAPHIC ANALOGY
I love visual analogies. The analogy of sound to vision eventually breaks
down, but it is fun to try.
Let's make a music video. And forget stereoscopy for a moment. That's where
the analogy breaks down, so I want to ignore it for a minute.
You video some musicians; playing a musical piece. Now how to play that
back?
Well, what aspects of the image that you shot are visible? Maybe we could
compare them to the EEFs.
PHYSICAL SIZE: One person looks at the video on a portable TV. Another uses
a projector and big screen. Hopefully no disagreement that the larger you
can make the image, the more like the size of the real thing, up to life
size.
BRIGHTNESS: There has been a lull in the brightness of projectors in recent
years because a lot of home theater owners are using screens that are less
than 8 feet wide. But obviously, the brighter you image the more like real
life, up to daylight brightness.
OPTICAL FIDELITY: This just refers to the accuracy in the light path from
image to screen, such as sharpness, color accuracy, and dynamic range from
black to white. Maybe also geometric aberrations such as pincushion or
stretching of objects.
SPATIAL CHARACTERISTICS: Such as perspective (telephoto, normal, or wide
angle) and three dimensionality. This is where the analogy breaks down,
because stereoscopy is more like binaural in audio, in which two images are
taken from one point in space and presented to each eye, and the perspective
is fixed. There is no great analogy to stereophonic, or a field-type system,
unless you want to take it to a sculpture rather than a "picture."
This sculpture might be made up of many smaller sculptures, made by separate
artists or molds and placed in the reproduction like mannekins in a
department store window. The mannekins, or objects, would need a background,
or set, possibly made from wide photos of an actual location. Then they
would have to be pulled out from the background for the perspective and 3D
effect. If this be the case, you could actually walk around in the image and
view it from various perspectives, unlike the stereoscopy example.
Nope. Can't have any relationship to audio, even if the individual objects
were musicians and you could use "shape shifter" speakers or project onto
separate little screens placed out into the room, and... well, too big a
stretch. Crazy.
But still.....
Gary Eickmeier
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