A really good friend of mine and I were talking about music the other day and he arrived upon a very compelling point that I had never considered until then. I thought I'd share it with you in the hopes that it intrigues you as well. This definitely wont apply to the average music listener so I hope this is able to resonate with you.
I was talking about how I wanted to achieve optimum audio quality with a music project I'm working on, and I presented my goals to him. I feel like my goals were somewhat rendered irrelevant by what he then said. The audial fidelity of any recording (actually EVERY recording) is entirely subject to representation that it is being given; ie listening to it on a burned CD on a small stereo, listening to it on vinyl with nice speakers, or streaming it online with a pair of ear buds. No matter what the recording sounded like when it was created, it will invariably sound very different with every other listener's listening configuration and setup. Therefore this lend a lot of validity to the idea of performing music live, and listening to it in person as the artist intended it to be heard.
So the idea that every person hears every album differently, and largely different from the artist has had me in a lot of ponderous moods this week.
Thanks for reading.
1 comment:
i think about this every time I'm hanging out with people or at a party where someone is playing music via youtube over laptop speakers. younger people especially seem to believe this is a perfectly acceptable way to listen to music.
even something as overlooked as the eq or "sound enhancer" in iTunes can have a drastic impact on the mix of something.
just record and mix knowing that only a small minority of your audience is going to give a fuck. unless you're making minimal techno or some genre with a default audiophile audience.
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