So How Do We Hear This Stuff?

Our perception of sound is so easy, so seamless, so unequivocal and clear, that it doesn’t seem like there is much to it. Guy/gal makes a cool noise, we hear it. Cool! What could be simpler?

Naturally, when we try to make a recording of said guy/gal’s sound and play it back out of loudspeakers we run into a little trouble, as you may have noticed. Guy/gal makes a cool noise, we record it, play it back. Not quite so cool. Why is that? The obvious answer that most of us like to fall back on is that our equipment isn’t good enough. And so there’s a lot of blather about accuracy going around these days, and we worry about our gear. We reason that if the gear was “really accurate,” why, it’d sound exactly like that soprano digeridoo we’re trying to overdub!

There is another explanation, however. What we perceive isn’t exactly what went in our ears. In fact, it isn’t like what went in our ears at all! What we consciously “hear” is far removed from the physical stimulus called “sound waves” that entered our ears. And because there is such a huge metamorphosis between our ears and our mind, it isn’t reasonable to assume that just because we’d like to think that we’ve made a really physically “accurate” recording of that soprano digeridoo, that in fact we have made a recording that is accurate for our perception.

Just because we’ve used “really accurate” microphones, consoles, recorders and speakers doesn’t guarantee a whole lot, it turns out. We need to consider our hearing mechanism in a little more detail, and understand a bit more about what it is doing. And, along the way, perhaps we need to redefine what we mean by “accurate.”

So, I’d like to devote a couple of articles over the next several months to the human auditory system and how “the way it works” affects our work as recording engineers and producers. As I mentioned earlier, most people get their emotional hits from music and sound at a pre-conscious level. And that gives us some powerful mojo. If we can get control of the raw sonic materials that generate those emotions, why, we can really get our listeners going and they’ll never even have a clue as to why! Maybe we can even come to rule the world!