Learning To Listen

I’d suggest starting with a single instrument whose sound you know well, ideally something with a full frequency range e.g.piano or cello.

Take a slow movement and try to focus on single notes: Initial attack, decay and reverb. Does it sound thin or full, too harsh or too soft? can you hear the harmonics of the base tone? Does it sound real or muffled or sharp?

Once you are comfortable with say solo piano move on to Trios: apply same approach to the added cello and violin. can you locate each instrument; is there air around each instrument and do they gell together?
Go from there to say a Symphony for strings only: can you hear first and second violins, violas, cellos and double basses in their respective locations? Does it gell or grate with you?

going on to full orchestra: start with piano or cello concertos, same questions. 

Only listen to large scale orchestral works once you have become really comfortable with all previous steps and with a bit of luck you might end up liking Mahler and Stravinsky!
Most of all: enjoy the music

larryh111:

millercarbon, 

there you go slobbering on the page again. Yes, I used the word slobber. At first I was going to use dribble but you got so caught up in yourself that all you left behind was a bunch of slobbering babble.  

" When people talk about tone they really are talking about volume. Frequency response is volume."

Yes, you actually wrote that. Frequency response is bandwidth and volume is amplitude. Do you ever re-read your posts before hitting the send button? 

Yes but, um, do you? Bandwidth is the entire frequency range across which a component works. Do you ever read your posts before hitting the send button? Or do you just not know the difference between frequency response and bandwidth? 
 
If you do know, then you deliberately edited my post to make it sound like I said something different. The full quote is:

When people talk about tone they really are talking about volume. Frequency response is volume. If the volume is equal at every frequency then we say it is flat. But all we mean is everything is the same volume.
The full quote makes clear we are talking about tone, which is the relative loudness of different parts of the frequency range.

That's just what it is. When you see a frequency response spec, what does it say? 20-20k +/-3dB. The 20-20k part is the range. What do you suppose +/-3dB is? What do we measure volume in? dB. So it is frequency by volume. Just what I said.

Question now is, should I be like all the other butt hurt snowflakes, go whine to a mod, have your post removed? Or leave it up there for everyone to see just how bad you blew it? Tough call. I think I'll let you remove it, or someone else. Wipe up your own slobber.

millercarbon,

This above is quicksand and you are standing in it with both feet. Do not move too much. it will help you.

Learn to listen, for once.

It is a learned habit more than an ability, but it is also some learned ability born from an habit, linked to a specific acoustical environment, speficic gear, and specific musical sources which the listener, one step at a time learn how to transfer or translate into other acoustical environments, other gears, and other musical sources...

At the end the listener is able to spot and name details the profane will perceive akin to superhuman hearing ....

It is not at all supernatural, only an habit growing and transforming itself at different speed in us in relation to specific acoustical experiences, specific gear experiences and specific musical experiences...

Listening is an habit slowly transformed in a journey, one step in front of the other but on many roads....If not it will stay the same habit forever....





«I made love so many times i can now make it with my hands behind my back; or is it cycling?»-Groucho Marx

All the above - MC’s oddness especially - is why taking a course like the one I posted, designed and run by sound engineers in academia (where rigour and science and peer review matter) is such a good idea.