GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Playback and chamber music.

Post Subject: Good question, Steverino.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 2/4/2014

steverino wrote:
If you went to a concert with chamber music and closed your eyes how would it be different?

Steverino, I think that the main difference between listening quartet recording and blind listening of live quartet is ability during life music to domically focus own attention to individual instrumentalist. During live musical even perception acts in multi-thread fashion and can at the same time completely independently focus on individual players. What is very important is that instant spotlight of listening attention on some phrasing of second violin for instance the whole perfection does of the work does not get ruined. Furthermore, as it shall be in real time multi-thread operation the focus from one player to another plays, to group of players switched instantly, without losing anything from the while quartet. In fact hearing in case of live music works like vision: your are at a hill and see a whole field of cows and you have no problem to observe each of them at the same time. With recorded quartet you rather watch at those cows in binocular, you can zoom in and out but you do lose the native relation between cows.

I do get the Steverino’s point that most of quartets are horribly recorded. I however mean something different. Is it possible to record and reproduce quartets differently? My leading idea that I discussed with a friend of mine a few days back was to record and to playback a quartet “in a grid”, where we record (and reproduce (!!!)) not only pressure and frequency but also timing when given pressure change. The second running idea was to reproduce sound with 4 omni-directional, octave-centric loudspeaker positioned as the players were recorded.

For sure it would be just an attempt to reproduce a “realistic” filed, he direction that I feel is not fruitful to begin with, however it would be interesting to hear it and to see how different might it be.

The Cat

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