Reading Response III

I was particularly interested in the discussion about hearing loss in the Alten chapter. As someone who frequently experiences loud sounds due to my proximity to live music and general interest in audio, I am constantly anxious about whether I am doing irreparable damage to my hearing and how to combat it. This fear often makes me mix my audio at low levels which leads to an altered mix when I go to play the tracks in different places. The explanation of relative loudness at different frequency levels is something that I’ve learned before and know intuitively but haven’t fully considered the ramifications of. I realize now that the reason so many of the things I create end up having more bass frequencies than originally intended is because of this low-level mixing. I am compensating for the higher hearing threshold of these lower frequencies and when I play the track on a louder speaker the relative loudness curve across these frequencies is flattened which leads to the bass frequencies being overly pronounced in the mix. The question that I am left with is how to mix while preserving the health of my ears, but while also maintaining the fidelity of the sounds that I want to create.

In the Pioneers of Power reading, I was interested in the way Busoni conceived of musical instruments as “fettered by a hundred limitations”. On the heels of our discussion around sample rate and bit depth, all ways of preserving the fidelity of sound, it’s interesting to think of acoustic instruments as a source of limitation and not the paragon that digital audio is always trying and failing to emulate. Now of course Busoni wasn’t talking about digital electronic music, but the same rhetoric of electronic synthesis being a tool for reproducing acoustic instruments was still there. Busoni’s perspective is refreshing as it sees electronic audio as a new horizon entirely—a way of overcoming the limits of physical sound production and entering an uncharted sonic world. Both this idealistic view of the liberatory quality of electronic music and the desire for the production and funding of an electronic sound laboratory discussed later in the article is fundamentally a desire for legitimacy. This is at the root of the dynamic between electric and acoustic music, a dynamic that has shifted but is still extant today. Despite all the sound we hear, for the most part, being electronically produced or reproduced, we still have a bias towards the physical. There is a difference in the cultural capital of being a classically trained instrumentalist and an accomplished producer that is based in how we canonize and mythologize acoustic sound differently than electronic sound.