- Dec 22, 2011
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Does anyone have a source for following quote:
There's mystery in room acoustics. A room makes musical sound much more complex. Pure, easily localized tones are engulfed by a deluge of reflections flowing from all quarters. At every moment in a big hall, all notes played in the prior two seconds land on your ears as a cluster of faint dissonances. With so complicated an analysis to perform, both harmonic and spatial, the brain ought to be overwhelmed. Yet we prefer this muddle, seeking out concert hall seats where sound is most complex.
But as we've seen, its a highly structured muddle that we desire. We want spatial complexity, but with a clear sound source. We want instruments to blend but still want to hear them individually. We want reverberations to rise quickly and fall off evenly, just like an instrument's tones. And we want the right balance between direct sound for localization, very early reflections for "intimacy", early sound for "definition" strong reverberation for "big sound", and long reverberation for "warmth".
There's mystery in room acoustics. A room makes musical sound much more complex. Pure, easily localized tones are engulfed by a deluge of reflections flowing from all quarters. At every moment in a big hall, all notes played in the prior two seconds land on your ears as a cluster of faint dissonances. With so complicated an analysis to perform, both harmonic and spatial, the brain ought to be overwhelmed. Yet we prefer this muddle, seeking out concert hall seats where sound is most complex.
But as we've seen, its a highly structured muddle that we desire. We want spatial complexity, but with a clear sound source. We want instruments to blend but still want to hear them individually. We want reverberations to rise quickly and fall off evenly, just like an instrument's tones. And we want the right balance between direct sound for localization, very early reflections for "intimacy", early sound for "definition" strong reverberation for "big sound", and long reverberation for "warmth".
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