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Listening

critical listening skills

1. What aural skills do experienced sound engineers, producers, tonmeisters, and musicians possess that allow them to make recordings, mix sound for film, or equalize sound systems better than a novice engineer?

2. What can the legendary engineers and producers, who have extraordinary abilities to identify and manipulate sonic timbres, hear that the average person cannot?

3. How do audio professionals hear and consistently identify extremely subtle features or changes in an audio signal?

4. How do expert listeners translate between their perceptions of sound and the physical control parameters available to them?

5. How can nonexpert listeners gain similar skills, allowing them to identify the physical parameters of an audio signal necessary to achieve a desired perceptual effect?

6. What specific aspects of sound should novice audio engineers be listening for?

main audio attributes and associated devices

1. spectral balance: parametric equalization

2. spatial attributes: delay and reverberation

3. dynamic range control: compression/limiting and expansion

4. sounds or qualities of sound that can detract from recordings: distortion and noise

5. audio excerpt cut-off points: source-destination editing

active listening

1. timbre. Is a particular microphone in the right place for a given application? Does it need to be equalized? Is the overall timbre of a mix appropriate?

2. dynamics. Are sound levels varying too much, or not enough? Can each sound source be heard throughout piece? Are there any moments when a sound source gets lost or covered by other sounds? Is there any sound source that is overpowering others?

3. overall balance. Does the balance of musical instruments and other sound sources make sense for the music? Or is there too much of one component and not enough of another?

4. distortion/clipping. Is any signal level too high, causing distortion?

5. extraneous noise. Is there a buzz or hum from a bad cable or connection or ground problem?

6. space. Is the reverb/delay/echo right?

7. panning. How is the left/right balance of the mix coming out of the loudspeakers?

心理聲學

• 等響度曲線

• Cocktail Party Effect

• Shepard Tone：例一、例二

• McGurk Effect：例一、例二

• masking effect（遮蔽效應）。參考此PDF檔第2～4頁。

• 各種遮蔽效應

  • pure tones masked by white noise

  • pure tones masked by narrow-band noise

  • approximation of narrow-band noise with tones

  • dependence of masked threshold on test-tone duration

  • pulsation threshold for pure tones

  • pulsation threshold for music

• 聽覺錯覺研究：Diana Deutsch 教授

隨堂測驗

McGurk Effect

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