About Juan Roederer, Psychoacoustics, National Public Radio and Neil Muncy

I began to seriously teach audio around 1970. Early on, it became apparent to me that my students needed to know something about how they perceive sound, so I adopted a book by Juan Roederer called “Introduction the Physics and Psychophysics of Music.” Using this book, I got my students to consider the physical, neurological and psychological mechanisms via which they perceive sound, audio and, of course, music.

Later on, when I was on the faculty at SUNY/Fredonia, I taught a course called Acoustics and Psychoacoustics. During that course, I had teams of students conduct several basic psychophysical measurements, such as determining the “Just Noticeable Difference” for frequency, amplitude, and phase shift, for instance.

One of the interesting characteristics of psychoacoustics – the study of how acoustics are perceived by humans – is that it is difficult, almost impossible, to directly measure such perception. We are generally reduced to exposing test listeners to stimuli and asking them to report back to us “what they perceived.” Their answers are, of course, variable, and often idiosyncratic. I was interested to see this truth manifested in my students’ measurement projects, particularly as we compared their results with the “established” findings. There were, of course, differences between what my students found and what “the experts” found. A teaching moment, as they say . . . At the time, I attributed those differences to defects in our methodology, instrumentation, test design, and so on.

While I was teaching at SUNY/Fredonia, the University contracted with National Public Radio to host a summer program for NPR recording engineers and producers called “Music Recording Workshops.” NPR provided their own instructional staff, and my original role was to serve as audio host/gopher. However, just before the first year of these Workshops commenced, one of the key instructors, Skip Pizzi, had to cancel the workshop at the last moment due to a sudden health emergency (false alarm, fortunately!), and so I got tapped to fill in teaching some generic classes in his place. Having never met Skip, I had no idea how incompetent I was to do this – sometimes it is better not to know these things, I guess!

Therefore, through the agency of dumb luck, I found myself on staff with a rather remarkable group of audio professionals. The most notable among this distinguished group (which included, over the years, Paul Blakemore, Skip Pizzi, Ed Green, Shawn Murphy, Ron Streicher, Curt Wittig, Dave Glasser and others of similar caliber) was Neil Muncy.

Neil was and is an audio god. He’s a skilled recordist with some remarkable credits, a console designer from the days before Neve (his small location consoles are mostly still in service and treasured by their owners), and an audio theorist and acoustician. Neil’s specialty for these workshops, in addition to teaching about consoles, electronics, grounding and signal flow, was acoustics and critical listening (sometimes I think the rest of us taught at the workshops just to be near Neil!).

Neil introduced me to a serious and rigorous consideration of the audible implications of stereophony and loudspeaker behavior in reverberant spaces. He introduced me to a more critical and considered evaluation of how and what people heard when they listened to music coming out of loudspeakers. And finally, Neil introduced me to the work of Floyd Toole.