The View From 2009: This is a reflection on some of the cognitive problems we have with loudspeakers. The problems haven’t gone away. I think they’re gonna be with us for a long time.

When Our Willing Suspension of Disbelief Hits the Wall

Recently, I had an exhibition in a Boston art gallery of what I have called “sound sculptures.” I call them this simply in order to justify their presence in an art gallery. In fact, these works are big “classical” pieces of electronic music composed especially for a really good six-channel surround system (the usual five channels plus an overhead channel). In this case, I used Sausalito Audio Works’ really awesome new reference speakers called Ulysses.

It was a composer’s dream come true. For five weeks, four big pieces of mine (over two hours worth of music!) ran daily under nearly ideal performance circumstances in a public venue. No performance problems. No rehearsal issues. No crummy sound reinforcement. No levels problems. Some people came back to listen over and over. Others murmured things to me like “better than Mahler,” “like Brahms,” “revolutionary,” “Bach would have approved” and “gorgeous!” What more could a composer ask for than that?

However, the exhibition has revealed a problem that I had been sort of dimly aware of, but which, now that I’ve finally gone public with my music, turns out to be a problem that seriously limits the reach of my music. And sooner or later it’s going to affect all of us creating “loudspeaker music.” That is why I’m sharing this with you.

You see, I wrote music that might be described as “Music For Six Extraordinarily Good Loudspeakers In A Particular Array” or “Music for Virtuoso Loudspeakers.” It’s quite demanding, using 90 dB of dynamic range and often involving the entire audio spectrum from 20 Hz. to 20 kHz. all at once and at high levels for minutes on end, in a glorious high-output wash of hemispheric sound that effectively replaces, or at least stands in for, a good symphony orchestra running at full voice.

My partner at Sausalito Audio Works, Manny LaCarrubba, describes it as “speaker-killer” music, as he frets and worries about driver excursion, temperature and, ah, failure. It presents signals to speakers that will tend to either fry or shut down any conventional consumer speaker that tries to play anywhere near this spectrum at these levels, mainly because the music is really sustained, in a way orchestras hardly ever can achieve without the players keeling over from exhaustion and/or injured chops. By the same token, the music turns out to be simply unlistenable over the radio, in a car, or in any other constrained listening circumstance.

For all that, the music sounds phenomenal when you play it over six really good loudspeakers properly set up, if I do say so myself.

But what happens when you play it over NS10s? Or worse, Auratones? Well, it’s kind of like playing a Bach organ work on a Farfisa. Should be OK, in theory, but in practice, well, it’s ludicrous.

And here’s where the problem is. We can make a recording of a Bach fugue played on a cathedral organ, play it back over Auratones, and actually get something from it. It’s due to a phenomenon called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” We somehow manage to ignore the sonic limitations of the Auratones and we mentally “fill in” the sound quality of the organ and its host cathedral. We do this without thinking about it – our “willing suspension” works pre-consciously and it is central to our experience of listening to recordings. We manage to ignore the Auratones and its cues that tell us that these are crummy speakers. Somehow, instead, we manage to successfully imagine the organ, or an orchestra , a rock band, a jazz combo, whatever. As I said, it’s a WILLING suspension of disbelief.

But how do we play back the sound of a really good array of loudspeakers over a lesser array of poor loudspeakers? How can we, for instance, play back the sound of six Genelec 1035 studio monitors over two Auratones. We can’t, it turns out.

Meanwhile, people ask me for recordings of this music. They’d love to play this stuff back at home. “Why don’t you release a CD?” they ask. (Actually I did, of one of the pieces. See me after class.) But it doesn’t really work. They can’t buy a CD, take it home, play it and get ANYTHING LIKE the experience they heard in the gallery. I know – I’ve tried. What they’ll get is a wimpy blend of grunge, distortion, and a thin gruel of wannabe sound that not only misses most of the spiritual essence of what I’ve composed, but also a significant chunk of its actual physical content.

This is because this is music that comes out of the loudspeakers, not off the CD. It’s loudspeaker music, pure and simple.

I’d love for you to hear it. And it does exist as a discrete multitrack recording. But I haven’t figured out a way to cut it down to stereo (or even 5.0 – because the vertical quality is so integral). So, there’s no way you can successfully play it back and HEAR it unless you buy my speakers and install them – an admittedly expensive and probably impractical solution (although it DOES make for a killer surround monitoring system – trust me). In the meantime, you’ve got to wait until I can get a gallery or museum in your town to host an exhibit. Dang! Sorry about that.

A few images from the sound exhibition (Sean Maclean, photographer)

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Dave Moulton is hard at work composing even more unplayable pieces. You can complain to him about anything at moultonlabs.com.

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