How does relative humidity affect our music?



Winter is here in the Northern Hemisphere, so things are changing both outside and in.

Last week I posted a thread because I cleaned my current CD player for the first time using an old Milty CD Lens Cleaner that I found when I rearranged my CD rack. I thought, and still think, that perhaps one or more pieces of the brushes broke off and were still on the lens. The music wasn't a precise as it was before, and I was fearful that I'd damaged the laser with the cleaning.

Another thing that was noticeable was a very significant amount of excess bass. That didn't make any sense to me because I couldn't see how anything like a laser misreading would increase the bass like that.

Now I'm wondering if the excess bass might be a result of low relative humidity in my room. I checked it and it was 30%. I pulled the humidifier off of the shelf in the garage and set it up between the living room and dining room but couldn't even get the humidity up to 40%, so I went and bought a second one for the back part of the house. Now I have the relative humidity up between 40%-50% and the bass sounds fine.

My question is: was it the lack of humidity that caused this problem and if so, why? Did it affect the sound waves traveling through the air? Did it in someway dry out the absorption panels, making them more reflective instead of absorbing as they normally do? I also noticed that my sinuses were congested due to the change in the weather, so was it just my hearing?

Has anyone else noticed this, or have any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Chuck
krell_man
Since humidity changes the density of the air, its a pretty safe bet that transmission of sound waves formed by differences in air pressure will vary somewhat as humidity varies. The question will be how much different and whther significant enough to make a difference or not.

If you can do controlled listening tests where you are able to control the humidity and do some sort of objective listening test, you are probably in the best position to determine if in fact it is worth worrying about or not.

OF course, it can be hard to set up such tests properly where any changes heard are accountable to a specific dependent variable, like relative humidity. What if barometric pressure is significantly different? That could have a similar effect.

But relative humidity having some effect on sound is certainly a possibility FWIW, I would say. Not sure how much sleep I would loose over it though.
Would think humidity affects wood pulp speaker cones. I know humidity changes affect wooden musical instruments and gut strings.