Viewpoints: Ears vs. Measurement (Part 2)
Philosophical Clash: That Which is Known vs. That Which is Measured
By
Doug Jones
Those of you who follow this feature will note that Jack usually writes
first, then I respond. Some of you have requested that we do it the other
way around. We will try to do that. However, I actually enjoy it when
Jack shoots first. This issue’s topic is a prime example of why I prefer
having the last word!
SOMETHING BORROWED
I am tempted to borrow a phrase from the famous Saturday Night Live
point/counterpoint parody of years gone by….and begin with “Jack you ignorant
slut”. Would that I could. Maybe I have too much class, or maybe I’m unsure
of the accuracy of the descriptive words in that phrase. I have no direct
evidence, for example, that suggests that Jack is a slut. So, how should
I respond?
Jack, you ignorant slut! ( hey, that felt pretty good!) Ok, so
that is out of the way. Lets start with the discussion of the world views.
In a long past response to Jack I talked about the difference between
objective and subjective and how that relates to audio.
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Permit me to return to that for a moment. These are always alternate views of the same topic. Such alternate views are often “correct”, but incomplete. Consider a clear plastic box with a bent wire inside. If you look at the box from one face, (without the ability of stereoscopic vision which gives depth perception) it would look like this. |
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If you rotate the box 90 ° so that you look at face B, it might look like this: Now, do we know what shape the wire is? Not really. Without the third dimensional view, we can’t know for
sure the shape of the wire. From the top it may look like any one
of these shapes and more. |
I am not going to try to draw the 3D view, as many of you who have taken
classes with me can testify to, I can’t draw! It should be clear that
NO single view of the box fully describes what is inside, not even the
3D. Any angle you take to look at the box is either incomplete or distorted.
I am the first to acknowledge that this analogy is imperfect, as all analogies
are. Still, it teaches us something about perception and measurement.
The most obvious lesson is that we need both. To measure and not listen
is foolish. To only listen and not measure is dangerous.
SUBJECTIVE REFERENCE
Lets explore Jack’s assertion that if something sounds bad and measures
good, it is still bad. Of course, two frames of reference exist here,
but all the descriptors belong to only one frame.
What does it mean to sound bad, or good for that mater? What percentage
of FOH engineers will agree that a certain desk, speaker or amp sounds
good? How many Performance audio types will openly agree that they really
like a particular mix?
Fish is good (the seafood, not the band). Jack hates fish. Does that make
fish bad? How does Jack reconcile the very real situation of the mixer
who equalized a track or a channel only to find while striking the board
that the EQ was not engaged?
That is one of the challenges with the subjective frame of reference;
our perception is subject to illusion. The second part of the assertion
is even more problematic.
What does it mean to measure good? A measurement has no aesthetic component.
A measurement can be accurate, or precise, or efficient I suppose, or
the inverse of the above, but it is only data. If I drive from my house
to my office my odometer will indicate that I traveled 11.4mi(19km).
Is that a good measurement? Well I never have yet arrived at work and
proclaimed “wow what a great measurement” in fact I don’t really care
how far it is most of the time.
One measures something and quantifies it in order to learn more about
it, and to give others a reliable frame of reference. I can be sure that
my office will always be 11.4 miles away from my house. I certainly can’t
be sure it will take me thirty-two minutes to arrive. Some days it does,
other days it takes ninety minutes.
I have even less confidence in applying subjective terms to my commute.
On some slow traffic mornings, when I carpooled with a friend, it took
fifty minutes, but I’d have described the commute as ‘fabulous” because
scintillating conversation made those minutes fly.
On other mornings, when it took a half hour to get there, it seemed to
take forever because I was late for a meeting. It is hard to trust perception.
I argue that the best way to describe my commute to anyone seeking that
information, would be to say that it is 11.4 miles, much of it in city
traffic. That is science. That is fact.
An amplifier may have .01% THD. That is fact. It may say nothing about
the way that amp will sound. If an audio component really does sound bad
and you can’t find something to measure that will explain it, you are
probably measuring the wrong thing.
QUANTIFIED QUALITY
The other part of Jack’s claim is that if something sounds good and measures
bad, then you are measuring the wrong thing. This is also problematic
for me, for the reasons already cited. Jack’s measurement claim is simply
not true and inconsistent with Jack’s own real world experience. Take
the case of the vacuum tube. Jack loves tubes.
If you measure the harmonic distortion that comes from a tube, you will
find a rather significant amount of even order harmonics being generated
especially as the tube approaches clipping. However, it is well known
that humans tend to like the sound of even order harmonic distortion.
Such distortion sounds good and measures “bad”, but we are not measuring
the wrong thing. We have simply re-affirmed that we don’t experience the
world around us in the same way that we quantify it.
I have been an AES member for more than two decades. The AES journals
and papers and workshops presented over the years reveal a significant
proportion of work dedicated to listening and subjective audio experiences.
Many of my most compelling audio experiences were at AES presentations
and workshops. For fairness (and honesty) I must add that, to our shame,
some of the worst PA I have ever heard was at AES conventions.
Is asking a scientist to use a mic correctly like asking a FOH mixer to
solve quadratic equations with a slide rule? I wonder!
At the same time, the WORST sound I have ever heard has been at large,
live shows. It usually sucks! As such, I can’t attend large live shows.
Sure, I’m old, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that musical sound reinforcement
is almost always too loud, tonally imbalanced, unintelligible and without
clarity.
I was making measurements for a client at a large outdoor shed a number
of years ago and I measured 120dB peak sitting in the third row before
the house was turned on. This was the spill from the monitors! Fortunately,
I had my hearing protectors with me.
The show was terrible. It was loud, distorted and dangerous. No “musicality”
was evident. That FOH “engineer” was irresponsible and there was no evidence
anywhere of an audio aesthetic.
The kids in the first twenty rows all had to experience temporary threshold
shift. I would lay odds that a number of them left that “concert” with
permanent hearing damage. (No, Jack wasn’t on the gig.)
My point is that is ludicrous to brand one group as a-musical because
they only measure. Further, it is equally wrong minded suggest that people
who only listen are God’s children, because they produce musical results.
I don’t have as much experience as Jack, but I have been around the block
a few times. Jack references the live engineer “process(ing) the shifts
in the room sound as the day progresses”. I wonder, is that done by “burning
one” a few hours before the show starts?
I can already hear Jack howling “foul”, and he is right. Just because
there are, among the ranks of live sound engineers, those who do not take
their craft seriously, does not give me franchise to stereotype the lot
as potheads.
Likewise, just because there are AES members who measure and never listen,
does not mean that all AES members lack an evolved sense of aural aesthetic.
SCIENCE & SOCIETY
What is the role of science in our society? This is a big question that
deserves a bigger mind than mine to wrestle with it. At the risk of offending
the countless philosophy majors who read these pages I will tell you what
I think.
Science is about knowledge; not faith, not wisdom, nor beauty, nor emotion,
not love. KNOWLEDGE. The scientific method attempts to explain the universe
by building hypotheses and testing them.
It looks for phenomena that are repeatable. Science as we know it got
its start by trying to explain why five of those dots of light (i.e.stars)
out of the hundreds of thousands of dots of light visible in the unpolluted
night sky of millennia ago, always behaved differently than the
rest.
It is that question “why?” that burned in the hearts of our forebears
that ultimately resulted in the knowledge required to build the
Midas console that Jack and I are so fond of.
Our society has elevated the scientist to the level of secular priesthood
because the fruit of scientific labor makes our lives so easy and pleasurable.
Do I really believe that? As I reflect on how much grief I have experienced
in the last week as a result of technology gone awry, brakes going out
on my car, computer glitches, servers being down, refrigerators giving
out, I conclude the “easy and pleasurable” part is urban myth.
I’ve lived in societies with no cars, computers, servers or refrigerators.
I must say it wasn’t all that bad… but I digress. Those of us in the first
world worship scientists because we accept their claim to making our lives
easier.
Still, it is true. Our lives are much longer and productive then our great-grandfathers
were. Much of that “progress” is due to science and applied science or
technology. The reason for the quotes around “progress” is that I do not
believe that our lives are necessarily subjectively better then those
of our ancestors.
I have another Columbia College colleague who believes that Gilligan’s
Island was a general metaphor about twentieth century society. Who was
the most valuable person in terms of keeping everyone alive and well?
The professor!
Jack, I’m sure, would assert that MaryAnn or Ginger made the show worth
watching! What do you suppose it means that the show’s star was a loveable
goofball? Again I digress.
NO MADNESS IN THIS METHOD
Scientific method requires disciplined record keeping. The keeping of
records, both formal and informal, allows each generation to build upon
past scientific achievements. It is because the AES, and societies like
it, preserve the work of scientists, that we don’t have to reinvent the
wheel (literally) every generation.
Records need to be more than “grab a bunch of parts, put them together
in a pleasing fashion and turn it into an amp that kicks butt”. Progress
requires measurements, specifications, details and data. You better believe
that the people that who make the balsamic at Charlie Trotters know precisely
what is in it.
Are we scientists “genericizing the world” and reducing everything to
our level? No, we are trying to define what we have learned and communicate
that knowledge to the next generation. Hopefully, they can improve on
the evolving body of work.
There are obvious differences between designing equipment and using it.
The designers don’t always make the best users and vice versa.
There was recently a Public Television documentary about Three Mile Island.
The operators responded to what their instruments measured, and to a lesser
degree what their intuition told them. It took the designers to
forcibly insist that the operators flood the core with water to prevent
an even larger disaster. Again we have science to the rescue.
Jack fondly cites the story of the battle of Midway, a decisive WWII battle.
He is right that he heroes were the ones who flew the planes. Or were
they? The planes were the Douglas SBD Dauntless and the TDB1 Devastators.
They carried up to 1900lbs(709Kg) of ordinance and could fly faster than
200mph(322Ksec) over a range of over 1100+mi(1770+Km)
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The planes were designed by Edward Heine-mann in the late 1930s. Who had the greater responsibility? Was it the guy flying the plane? Or, was it Heinemann, who figured out how to take many thousands of pounds of metal, make it fly and serve the purposes of its controller with little more than a slide rule and the immature science of aeronautics to guide him? It certainly seems to me that Mr. Heinemann was doing some “heavy lifting”. You want a challenge? Photo #1 displays the back of some of Heyser’s hand built test equipment. One might say, “any box of parts, any spool of wire, any soldering iron any time…….” THREE PARTING SHOTS |
1. Unless you need to fix a problem where the solution is not
immediately evident, measurement is often NOT the best way to adjust a
sound system.
I have told the story of working in an auditorium where there was a feedback
problem that would not go away no matter how much EQ we used. It took
a TEF analysis to discover that there was a discrete and intensely focused
reflection from a structural member right back at the podium. Several
square feet of strategically applied fuzz fixed the problem.
If this were a live gig, the engineer would have simply equalized it and
rode the fader all night to make the best of it. That would have been
fine for the ephemeral one night stand.
In a fixed install, it is better to try to permanently fix the problem.
Such solutions can rarely be made by ear alone.
2. We can’t measure everything we can hear. I am convinced of this.
Richard Heyser used to point out that audio was “n dimensional” and we
can only measure a few of the dimensions.
3. Measurement and listening are not enemies and should not be
treated as such. The only way audio will progress is for these two factions
to continue the dialog and call each other to accountability. I hope this
point/counter-point is a small step in that direction.
By the way, Jack, you are clearly not ignorant!
Douglas R. Jones is the Chair of the Sound Department at Columbia College (Chicago). He may be reached via e-mail at djones@popmail.colum.edu
September/October 2001 Live Sound International