Ears

Niall - Dahlia

Something I was thinking about, not to be taken too seriously...

I was sitting waiting for a track to bounce down at the weekend, and started messing about with my ear lobes while listening...as you do in the world of real time bouncing!

The slightest movement of the outer ear dramatically effects the frequency response you hear, as well as what you hear "off axis", stereo width etc.

We all have different shaped ears, so we all hear things slightly differently.

Our "inner frequency response", what we personally deem as being flat, is just what we are use to hearing on a day to day basis throughout our whole life. But if I was to implant my (pointy) ears onto somebody else, they would perceive everything as being skewed compared to what they are use to, as if through a multiband EQ.

If you're reading reviews and recommendations about monitors for example...well, is anybody's opinion really worth ****? Those monitors with too much mid information, for example, might just appear so for that particular reviewer. You have to hear for your self.

And what about the perfect outer ear shape?! Do you have lovely ears? Maybe in the future us sound engineers will be able to buy ear implants, moulded from respected top engineers, that give us a perfectly flat industry standard frequency response!

peter05

Every Monitor will react different in every room and to the person listening to it. Look for an anechoic reading before purchase.

I am heading to Landan early December to check out Focal SM9 and some PSI monitors am sure I'll hear different from others and won't know how the interact with room till they are placed here.

madtheory

Yes everyone's ear lobes are different, but the brain is an amazing thing. The Equal Loudness contour is based on a survey of close to a million people I believe, and it shows that we all perceive sound pretty much the same way.

There's a bit more to it than that obviously. Wiki and google scholar will get you more detail.

But there's a big market for pseudoscience- a fool and his money and all that. So I'm sure you'd have a market for moulds of expert ears!

krd

Niall - Dahlia wrote: »

The slightest movement of the outer ear dramatically effects the frequency response you hear, as well as what you hear "off axis", stereo width etc.

Yes, but I bet if you tied your ears into a funny position, they'd adjust within a few minutes.

Your ear filters, and does funny things. You can become over focused on a particular sound, and not realise that is sounds fine and something else is dreadful. Or it sounds dreadful - and then you hear it weeks or months later and it sounds fine.

Then there other things to do with the room. And the volume you're listening at. Kick drums are something you feel (I don't mean that in an emotional sense - I mean, given the right kick and volume, it resonates your rib cage)

trackmixstudio

Get Logic.
Offline bounce you save your obviously fading sanity :-)

Niall - Dahlia

trackmixstudio wrote: »

Get Logic.
Offline bounce you save your obviously fading sanity :-)

You know I am tempted, for that reason, but also because the MIDI controls on the Zed are absolutely redundant in Pro Tools. Unfortunately I track on a Mac and mix on Windows. I presume you can assign the 16 pots to plugins in Logic no problem?

krd wrote:

but I bet if you tied your ears into a funny position, they'd adjust within a few minutes.

Yeah that's what I figured, your brain would adjust. But I'm still going to patent the ear moulds...

trackmixstudio

Can you not set it up with PT using a MIDI translator. There is full info on the A&H site.
Automation quick access is great on logic. Move any paramater on anything, hit learn, move a physical knob or fader. Done! Simple and really handy.

studiorat

A little aside here, the shape of the pinnae, (the part of the ear that resides outside the head) helps us localize sound in the vertical plane. If you mess with the shape of the ear, with moulds or something at first we have problems localizing sound, then we rapidly re-learn this skill. Interestingly we can then process sound with and without the moulds equally well...

http://www.mbfys.ru.nl/~johnvo/papers/nn98.pdf

Similarly, Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTF's) measured impulses of the diffraction by torso, head and external ear, can be used to simulate surround sound with two speakers or headphones like A3D, EAX ad OpenAL which are used across the gaming industry.