COM - WEEK 1 - CRITICAL LISTENING SKILLS

This week’s seminar was devoted to listening to one of the lessons from the book (with matching CD) Critical Listening Skills For Audio Professionals, the object of which I presume is to refine our ability to focus our auditory perception to the high levels necessary to make successful audio engineering decisions. We examined variations in level at given frequencies, amongst other things and determined that changes in level are generally more noticeable at lower frequencies and louder (starting) levels. In speech as well as music, 2dB is (for most people) the smallest detectable change in level, which we discovered by listening to endless repeats of the same paragraph of text and the same extract of music. It would have been vastly more entertaining had the reader demonstrated this point by telling a dirty joke and playing fragments of say, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy but I appreciated the lesson nevertheless. It was also postulated that “random noise” can be defined as noise or sound which is constantly shifting in frequency and amplitude and we listened to examples of such with specified centre frequencies. The narrower the bandwidth around that centre frequency, the more “like” that frequency the noise becomes. Sadly, this puts paid to my claim that my bands are all based around random noise.

References

Everest, F. 2006, Critical Listening For Audio Professionals, Course Technology, Boston.

Whittington, S., Concepts of Music (Aural) Seminar (personal notes) 31/07/08