In article ,
"Arny Krueger" wrote:

Good Lord! Did your QuoteFix blow a fuse?

MINe 109 wrote:
In article ,

"Arny Krueger" wrote:

MINe 109 wrote:

In article ,
"Arny Krueger" wrote:

"MINe 109" wrote in message


...

You missed the suggestion on another forum that you
don't really
know what your instrument sounds like.

This is true for many instruments and the voice.
Compared to
what the audience hears, the musican hears a highly
distorted version of the music he makes.

This is true but it doesn't change that the musician has
a
sophisticated expectation of what the instrument should
sound like.

And that doesn't change the fact that the musician has a
distorted view of the sound of music compared to a
typical
listener.

The original question had to do with whether a musician
really knows
what *any* instrument sounds like whether or not the
musician is
playing it at the time. It's absurd to say
instrumentalists knows
*less* about the sound of their instrument (because of
distortion)
because they play.

My comment was 100% responsive to that question. By
reviewing it without actually responding to my comment
Stephen, we see you using debating trade tactics to avoid
conceeding the point. You're just leading the discussion
around in a circle.

"This is true" was intended as a response to your comment. Perhaps you
missed it (go up four paragraphs). Far from conceding the point, I
accepted it but suggested that its practical meaning is not what you
imply it is.

Musicians develop an "outside ear."

Meaning exactly what?

The learned ability to relate the sound they hear inside
their heads
to the sound as it is in the room.

IME this is often defective and overblown in the musican's
own mind.

You don't have any E of the musician's own mind, but that aside, as a
learned ability, it will be present in different degrees in different
musicians.

For an unlearned way to do this, next time you sing a
hymn, lift the
hymnbook with one hand while cupping the other hand behind
your ear to
collect the reflected sound of your voice.

Seems like a very impovrished way to do this.

So what? Doesn't it sound different? It's more like the room than like
inside your head.

It's an
acoustically defective way to accomplish the task. For
example, the cupping of the ear creates a resonant cavity
that distorts the quality of the sound quite a bit.

You'll find that one can vary the cupping to find an acceptable degree,
perhaps by imagining your hand as an extension of your ear.

What I do is compare recordings of my voice to recordings of
other people's voices made under similar circumstances, and
compare that to how I hear my own voice. The recording
procedures were arrived at by trying to get natural
reproduction of music.

Once you've acquired this sense of what your voice sounds like, you no
longer need new recordings to confirm this sense, yes?

Atypical anecdote: I met a pianist who complained she was over-relying
on her tape recorder in that she wasn't listening to her performance as
she played because she was going to listen to the tape later.

Nevertheless, I have few illusions that the information I
arrive at by these improved technical means is much more
than a gross approximation. Procedures like this are very
insensitive and reliable compared to say, ABX. But they are
hugely accurate and diagnostic compared to traditional
procedures.

And have nothing to do with how a musician would relate to a recording
of his own performance.

Musicans also seem to develop enlarged egos of a kind,
particularly related to their hearing.

What with the lifetime of hard-earned experience.

IME its often a lifetime of deceiving themselves. For
example, I've worked with a lot of musicans who strongly
prefer to work in rooms that blur their work and thus
conceal their technical errors. Their addiction to these
rooms has, right before my eyes, degenerated into personal
power plays to preserve dysfunctional performance spaces at
the expense of the stated function of the rooms.

Translate please. Perhaps the musicians like the sound of the
reverberant space and have a performing style that utilizes a strong
sense of projection ("play mistakes softly, please"). If the space is a
church, these preferences have to be balanced against the need for
speech to be easily understandable.

To put it another way, classical pianists often dislike extremely close
recordings because these minimize the room. It's not uncommon to see
references to Pianist X's live sound in comparison to his recorded sound.

Clearly not all musicans are like this. I've also seen other
musicans gravitate toward rooms that are more neutral and
readily adaptable for a broad range of functions. There
seems to be some kind of "big fish in a small pond" effect
with some people. Musicans that work together in larger
groups can be pretty agressive about striving to produce and
identify high performance.

And its not necessarily their fault. The infrastructure they
work in is not always that good.

I imagine there would be controversy in building a symphony hall,
especially if some constituents really want a multi-use facility.

IME a lot of middle-aged musicans seem to have quite a
bit
of hearing damage. I was sitting next to a vocalist
friend a
week or two back, and she told me that she couldn't hear
a
guitar that was obviously being played pretty robustly.
She
blamed the sound system. I could hear it quite well and
quite clearly.

This is a typical anecdote?

Not necessarily completely representative, but not atypical.
If we look at history, musicans who are baby boomers have
had exceptional opportunities to damage their ears with
their own music making.

Some retain sharper listening ability, as I said. A recent newspaper
article reported that some apparent old age hearing deterioration is due
to loss of listening skills rather than on changes in the physical
mechanism.

While musicians aren't immune to hearing
damage, this doesn't necessarily undo their discernment.
After all,
the question is one of listening, not hearing.

Well Stephen it seems like possibly your own egocentrism has
kept from experiencing the learning experiences that might
inform you about the limitations of your own hearing
abilities.

Doesn't matter: all I have to do is pay attention to the audience, right?

Listening for flaws in audio reproduction
involves what are usually far smaller differences than are
involved in listening for flaws in music making. I often see
musicans who confuse the two. A little ABXing or something
like it can make it all pretty clear.

Not only smaller, but different. One doesn't need ABX to overcome that
misapprehension.

Stephen