Neurological evidence indicates we not only learn to listen, but actually tune our inner ear response based on neural feedback from the brain. We literally are able to actively tune our own hearing.
When we listen for a flute for example, this is more than a conscious decision to focus on the flute. This creates neural impulses that actively tune ear cells to better hear the flute.
“Selectively changing what we’re listening to in response to the content.Literally reaching out to listen for things.”
Here’s another good one. Everyone can hear subtle details about five times as good as predicted by modeling. Some of us however can hear 50 times as good. The difference? Years spent learning to listen closely! https://youtu.be/SuSGN8yVrcU?t=1956
Learning to play music really does help improve your listening.
This video is chock full of neurphysiological evidence that by studying, learning and practice you can develop the listening skills to hear things you literally could not hear before. Our hearing evolved millennia before we invented music. We are only just now beginning to scratch at the potential evolution has bestowed on us.
Learning to play music really does help improve your listening.
Absolutely agree, and have written about this previously in a couple Listening threads.
These steps have helped me:
1) Hearing live music. As an extension, being trained to play in an ensemble. Are either required? As @whart has written multiple times...no, but the skills can be applied to listening to a home audio system.
2) Listening to a familiar recording across multiple systems, sometimes with the guidance of the system’s owners to be made aware of elements/aspects in a system’s sound. I hate hearing the same recordings over and over, but the fact is the process is extremely helpful when learning to listen to a system, then later when evaluating changes to a system...or evaluating an unfamiliar system.
3) Related to above - listening to tracks on test LPs or CDs: Stereophile, XLO,etc. Why is this helpful in learning how to listen? Each recording on a test disc is provided because it offers an example (or examples) of a particular quality: human voice, piano, venue cues, image depth/width. Liner notes usually explain what to listen for in each. Very, very helpful in the process of learning how to listen.
4) Someone to guide (or teach) during a listening session, preferably in one’s own system so the sound characteristics are familiar. I had a manufacturer once come to my home to demonstrate a component. Toward the end of the demo, he swapped in some footers he liked to use. We also compared to footers I owned. He offered some observations that were quite helpful, and provided a lesson in listening.
Number 4 is important. In my life, when I didn’t understand something, or when I didn’t perceive something someone else perceived, it was always helpful for that person to explain in detail what they were perceiving, and guide me to it. Guide me toward how to do it. When a breakthrough occurred, it was a very exciting moment.
Great posts guys. This is what I love about AudioGon. Wonderful stuff. #2 and #4 have been a big part of my listening journey. I still have more to learn and enjoy the process.
It was listening to the XLO Test CD track Poor Boy that triggered my awareness, of what I was hearing from some of the better CD players and amps. They were less etched and grainy than mine, but it took playing this all analog recording to make the connection.
Yeah I was on vacation 30 years ago and had a worbling sound in my ear.I went to the audiologist in that town/city and they ran some tests.And then asked if I was in the recording industry.I said, “no why?” They said the only documented case were with people in the industry that have the effect where the muscle that tightens the drum to loud noises is able to stay relaxed.I said that I had a stereo, and they said to listen with less effort.
When I clicked on the link I saw I was more than 20 minutes into it from a previous viewing. Just forgot about it. Great stuff that we've used to argue to naysayers that this is all a learned and perfected talent just like any other sense.
Once honed, our listening abilities know what and when to listen for when evaluating music, especially familiar music, for comparing product.
@tvad great contribution. have benefited from your list as well as:
Making my own live recordings w both high speed tape / digital
recording same , only change is venue reverberant space
Learning to play fretless bass….
for those who have an open ear mind. , learning to distinguish between different formats in digital. The 2L recording label has a free downloads bench chock full of great stuff across formats.
attending the pre concert lecture
Sponsorship of expanding a recording studio microphone collection, Listened to 16 ribbon mics to pic 4
I LOVE this sort of thing. Anything neurological fascinates me. When it combines with our music hobby, all the more so. From my own reading, it does seem likely that timing is what continues to separate vinyl from digital. Now that we have begun to recognize this, it will just be a matter of time to create digital systems that are cognizant of the very small intervals to which our auditory system is sensitive.
Really believe the main trick to enjoy hifi is to enjoy it for itself, it is not live music and never will be. As a reviewer said recently all hifi is fake just find the fake you like.
@henry53, for the sort of music I enjoy, I agree with you. As more popular music is computer driven electronica and voices are autotuned, live performances for this genre are themselves fake, and so perhaps hifi in that case is less fake than it is when I play my Jazz and Classical records. Just playing here...
I am a neuroscientist and molecular biologist (PhD). Yes, listening is an acquired skill but individuals also differ in their innate (i.e., genetic) ability to discriminate different frequencies. The human auditory system is by far the most critical element in the high end "audio system" - the piece of wetware that is more important than any hardware component.
You could supply them a funnel as a passive hearing aid?
I am not sure that the wet ware “of the ears” is really the most important. For instance Japanese ears did not work with Navajo. But I thought that that was the wetware between the ears, more than the ear itself? And that someone purely and ethnically Japanese, but adopted and raised Dine, would somehow have ears that genetically changed from the statistical group of Japanese to become Dine hearing ears. Or it seems neurological more than structural..
Trying to figure out the point of your post.... Can you clarify because it really doesn't make sense to me. Not understanding a non written language where you have no reference points is not the same as what gerry is saying.
OP, thank you so much for this post. Adding it to my library and will learn from this. FYI, I've been having a back and forth with Ethan Winer and he keeps *insisting* that if his list of measurements show no difference between cables, then anything perceived is either part of a scam or placebo. Everyone who claims to hear a difference, he says, is a dupe or a shill. Everyone. I keep telling him that because the brain/perceptual systems are so complex, that he should not be so sure that he has the final word on what/how to measure for -- that he has to consider the complicated listener-perceiver side of the equation. He's a hedgehog; he won't budge. Ethan aside, this area of research is fascinating. Thank you for sharing this. If you ever find more, please share or DM me.
@ebm
Wow this is very important(NOT).
Once again, you parade your lack of curiosity as a virtue. (Hint: it's a vice.)
@gerryah930
individuals also differ in their innate (i.e., genetic) ability to discriminate different frequencies.
Interesting! How different are we? What's the range? References if you have any, please!
Not too long ago I saw an article in a scientific journal (misplaced as I am wont to do lately) which spoke entirely about reducing/eliminating tinnitus by training the brain to not process the errant signal it is receiving.
Which is why I constantly warn people off of listening to their gear. You get to a point where you can hear the dust settle on your cables. What good is it for your enjoyment? You’ve become a dust detector.
Best to buy good gear and then try to retune your ear/brain to music. Take courses in music theory or music history and stop chasing down the next big tweak.
This is also why I simply cannot listen to gear in a room with poor acoustics. I don't have that ear/brain filter many of you do. Good for you. :) So for my ear/brain musical needs good room acoustics are essential.
Seems that works for your interests Erik, but others enjoy differing aspects of this hobby. We are not all the same with the same audio/music desires or curiosities. Some love the music plus these other aspects of audio. All good. This site is about sharing these common passions and learning. No need to try and change other’s curiosities.
"Not too long ago I saw an article in a scientific journal (misplaced as I am wont to do lately) which spoke entirely about reducing/eliminating tinnitus by training the brain to not process the errant signal it is receiving."
barts-there are many studies with this goal, but unfortunately all still far the goal. I'm patiently waiting.
I must be one who can hear the details at many more than 5 times as predicted by modeling. I routinely listen to individual instruments throughout entire songs and it's been my experience that the most enjoyable songs are those that are made up of instrumental parts that could basically stand alone as their own songs and a vocal part that sounds good acapella. So if that bass line is moving up and down the scale instead of being stuck on one note for many bars, if those drums are using cymbal crashes and riffs at appropriate times, if the rhythm guitar is also moving around on the scale, and if that lead guitar is somewhat mimicking the vocal melody and is played as something more than just a filler when the vocals are silent, these songs tend to be more enjoyable to me. When a bass line is just playing a rhythm on a single note for several bars or the drums are just a pounding beat (as is true in much of newer music), then these songs tend to be of less interest to me. I play music trivia and when one of my teammates says that a song that is being played is great and then I point out how uninteresting the bass line is, I've ruined quite a few songs for people. I don't try to ruin the song for them intentionally, but I do try to get them to hear the individual instruments and then they get it.
winnaardt, We have a lot in common in the way we listen to music. I love picking out and following lines of different instruments and singers and use that skill to analyze my playback gear.
The more I can hear into a piece and pick something to follow, successfully, is my way of judging the ability to separate notes and themes. If that is successful, then lots of other parameters can be more easily met and judged. So the easier it is to judge begets ease of listening which begets satisfaction.
OP, thank you so much for this post. Adding it to my library and will learn from this. FYI, I've been having a back and forth with Ethan Winer and he keeps *insisting* that if his list of measurements show no difference between cables, then anything perceived is either part of a scam or placebo. Everyone who claims to hear a difference, he says, is a dupe or a shill. Everyone. I keep telling him that because the brain/perceptual systems are so complex, that he should not be so sure that he has the final word on what/how to measure for -- that he has to consider the complicated listener-perceiver side of the equation. He's ahedgehog; he won't budge. Ethan aside, this area of research is fascinating. Thank you for sharing this. If you ever find more, please share or DM me.
It was listening to the XLO Test CD track Poor Boy that triggered my awareness, of what I was hearing from some of the better CD players and amps. They were less etched and grainy than mine, but it took playing this all analog recording to make the connection.
This is all good, but I’m not certain what "etched and grainy" means to you in terms of sound. Since I don’t know for sure what it is in acoustical terms that you were perceiving I have no way of knowing if I could detect it. If I could detect it, I assume I would get a similar perception of it as you do. But without knowing what it is there’s no way to be sure. I can tell you what comes to mind for me when I think of those words in terms of sound - static and interference tones, with a few harsh peaks here and there. That would be the grainy part in my mind. Etched, well that’s harder to imagine but I would assume the starts and stops of tones would be louder than the middle and maybe start and stop with clicks, like a CB radio effect.
Are there any overtly etched and grainy sounding recordings that you can refer me to as a reference?
I found this video where a guy etched grooves in a tortilla with a laser and played it on a record player. Sounds grainy and etched in a corny way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdzCv_9eaoM
What you are asking is at the root of the Learning to Listen discussions: How do you learn to hear something you don’t yet know how to hear?
The first two were direct and to the point. Whatever it is you are able to hear today, there was a time when you were not. How did this happen?
With me, the words were there. Robert Harley has a great book where he talks about all these different terms. The smoothness of a sound lies somewhere along a continuum. Etch is harshest, then grain which can be coarse or fine, then as it gets smoother pristine, then liquid, and the liquid can be excellent clear water or go too far and be syrupy.
Anyone can hear these things, it is simply a question of learning. This discussion starts off with a video where we see the actual bio-neural pathways by which such learning happens. The question still remains, Why? How?
“Selectively changing what we’re listening to in response to the content. Literally reaching out to listen for things.”
That quote is from the video. He gives the example of the flute, but it could be anything. Note another time he talks about cells that respond very fast to transients. Very different from the ones we typically test hearing with. Those cells sense tones at different frequencies. We have way more hearing ability than just crude frequency. We can do way more than just pick out the flute.
Your question sounds exactly like where I was 30 years ago. You know all these terms, but where are they in the music? How do you learn to identify them? That is the big mystery.
Sorry we have to keep closing these threads. The one or two serious comments like yours and hilde45 get crowded out and worse. One so bad I had the mods remove it. The other one is closed but still there for viewing. Anyone seriously interested in the subject I would suggest it is worth the time to read, because you are not alone. Others have had these same revelations, epiphany, whatever you want to call it. When it happens it happens.
This video gives us the mechanism to understand some of it. When you decide to listen for something, anything (the flute) neural impulses physically alter the hearing mechanism to help make that happen. But you have to know what it is, you have to have something in mind. Which until you hear it and know you’ve heard it, how do you do that?
If you want to learn to pick out grainy vs smooth, well that is part of the burn-in process. Pretty sure you have already heard it. Just didn’t recognize that aspect of it. Tubes tend to be smoother, ss grainier. CD always grain compared to LP. Doug Sax mastered recordings are all liquid smooth. Ditto Sheffield.
Jennifer Warnes The Well, mixed by George Massenburg and mastered by Bernie Grundman is a lovely luxuriously liquid recording compared to Famous Blue Raincoat which is not grainy other than in comparison. That is one of the many things that makes this so hard. None of these things are objective absolutes. They are all subjectively relative. That is also what makes it so gratifying when you get it.
I find the subject to almost be boring or a self aggrandising lording over one superiority…However what I do find somewhat interesting, and possibly worth sharing for consideration, is that there is a lot of work being done on perception and reality.
The thesis tis that we have an internal model of the world in our brains, and things that comport with reality, are what we call rational thoughts.
In the case of spatial skills, after a while the infant’s brain allows the input from the eye to understand that a door or a floor is something that exists in the outside world. And when we are older,. We can walk to the toilet in the dark because we have a spatial model of the house’s interior in our brain, and with a few applications of a hand on the door jam, we can get to the toilet without banging our head or stubbing our toes.
It is not the infant’s eyes that are seeing a floor. They are supplying the information to the brain, and the brain sees the floor.
In a computer one could ray trace the various instruments and their time of propagation to a listener or microphone. That technique gets a lot harder for the inverse problem where one needs to locate the instruments using the computer. First one needs to know how many of them there might be and how to separated the signals either in frequency or time.
In a spetial sense once we know that there is a bass guitar and drum set, etc… then it would be possible in the computer, and likely could be happening in our minds/brains, that we move those sources around until their location fits the input signals optimally.
Similar to the baby’s eyes, It is probably not our ears that see the instruments as imaging… it is all done in the brain, and cannot happen easily without a pair of ears.
But the brain is also able to put things into the equation that are not there in reality… Whether it is skill that worth having depends if one has invested in a stereo… or if one is blindfolded Bruce Lee or Luke Skywalker then it is also a useful skill.
Nice link on David Byrne. Makes me wonder if our use of gear to listen to music is a kind of spandrel of it's own: an unintended outcome of our thirst for listening that's now an expensive and consuming hobby.
Jennifer Warnes ’Famous Blue Raincoat" and "The Well" both sounds lucious and liquid on my rig. Know this cuzz I have both serial numbered box sets.
Maybe your system???
Since it is easy to hear the difference on mine, but they both sound the same on yours, you figure out which is transparent and which makes everything sound the same.
I am rather new to this forum, but I honestly don’t understand why this topic seems to be so controversial. If you have ever learned to play an instrument, learned to read music, learned how to sing in a choir, learned how to harmonize with other voices, then this topic becomes very academic. You can and do learn how to listen for specific instruments, voices, harmonies, melodies, rhythms, etc. People with music training tend to have an easier time in identifying instruments and voices when listening to music. Most people have the ability to learn this with the possible exception of my father who was completely tone deaf (and he never learned how to sing in tune). It just takes time and the desire to learn.
I do apologize for any grammar mistakes, poor spelling, and if my comment seems rude. I am suffering from jetlag and the coffee just isn't helping.
But the brain is also able to put things into the equation that are not there in reality…
All the "gist" and intricacies linked to perception are precisely that there is not a "thing" that is absolutely here and out of consciousness... There is not a "res extensa" for a "res rationis"....And there is not even an absolute object called the brain here and out of consciousness which would create consciousness like my liver system my metabolism ...
We learned perceiving as babies but as adult we perceive our learnings histories as actual meanings and we grow to learn this simple truth...Meaning are more creatively real than "object", more deadly and more potent ...
For example a musical "timbre" is not out there like a table...It is created not only by physical acoustic, but also psycho-acoustic conditions and for "timbre phenomenon" experience, all humanity and personal histories combined participate substantially to his rendition for our consciousness ... Timbre is a meaning first even before being a musical objectively reproduced and conventionally partaked phenomenon...
All that is my opinion ....Take it for a minute to think...
«Did you just say that the thing which are not there are the more real or powerful?»-Groucho Marx 🤓
Our brains definitely “fill in gaps” from data supplied by our ears, eyes, nose, skin, etc.
This is a long-established area of medical/psychiatric study.
I’m a magic enthusiast. Not a practicing magician (was when I was a kid), but someone who follows the art form, and is interested in the history and the how.
I recently read a book, “Sleights of Mind”, that examines how magic works from the perspective of neuroscience. One of the primary take-aways is that our brains fill in the blanks from what we see and hear during a trick, and that these blanks are filled in incorrectly. This is how a magician fools us. He/she manipulates a prop in a manner our brain believes it has seen before, placing a coin in a hand for example. Many of us have seen a trick like this...the magician repeats placing a coin into someone’s palm several times, then when he/she does it the fourth time the coin disappears. The magician does something with the coin that fourth time that our brain doesn’t process correctly. Our brain processes what it “thinks” our eyes have seen based on seeing the coin placed in a hand several times prior. Our brain fills in the blank, and misses the sleight of hand, even though our eyes have plainly seen the manipulation.
To me, it’s not hard to correlate this concept of filling-in-the-blanks to audio reproduction. Many of us know the sound of a live stand-up bass, a drum, a trumpet. When we hear a recording of an instrument, do our brains fill in the gaps of missing recorded information and make that recording sound more “real”? I’d say the answer must be yes. Musical memory, familiarity with sound(s), is part of listening whether passively or actively. I’m sure there are published studies about this.
I can totally understand @erik_squires point of stop listening to the gear and just enjoy the music but I’m not exactly sure how to accomplish that.
I gave up on stereo gear and stopped listening to music for over 20 years because I had gotten to a point that I could not longer enjoy the music and only hear the equipment. I think part of that was I was limited to just the music I owned or the radio and didn’t have the myriad of listening choices that we have today. I was stuck listening to the same set of albums over and over again. That familiarity trained my ears to pick out minute details but also removed my enjoyment partially because I wasn’t able to acquire the best of the equipment I thought I needed. I was in a spiral of not being completely satisfied no matter what the gear and of an age that the current music just wasn’t that appealing so new music on the radio didn’t inspire me.
It could of been just my group of friends but this trend also happened to several of the people I knew.
It’s been almost 5 years now since I got back into listening. I started thinking I could be happy with anything but was bitten with there’s always better. I could now afford the best of the equipment I craved used for pennies on the dollar and I also have resources like this forum to learn from and services that allow me to listen to almost anything that was ever recorded.
For me one of the worst things I can do is use one of my favorite songs to demo gear. After a while it’s no longer enjoyable so Erik’s point is well taken. Hopefully this time I can listen without becoming obsessive. I still have tweaks to do to my present system but it makes me smile when I listen to it so the tweaks will happen more when I have the time not because it no longer brings me pleasure.
I honestly don’t understand why this topic seems to be so controversial. If you have ever learned to play an instrument, learned to read music, learned how to sing in a choir, learned how to harmonize with other voices, then this topic becomes very academic.
At some odds with your very valid point is that there are musicians who often don’t have very good systems or care very much about sound quality in audio systems. That may merely be because they just don’t care about audio quality sound -- which would be weird -- or that they listen in some other way. But the notion that if one is a musician they already know how to listen as an audiophile is contradicted in a lot of cases, and that presents a puzzle.
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