State of the art, State of the art: the book, By gerard rejskind – Koss Totem Mani-2 User Manual
Page 82
I
s music important to all humans?
I would say so, and it explains why
the first humans began to make
music even before they discovered
fire, or weapons with which to kill other
humans. We know, because we’ve found
remains of their instruments.
We also know that music is not lis-
tened to the same way by everyone. For a
substantial portion of the world popula-
tion, music has a deep importance, and
is listened to with a certain intensity and
concentration. That would be the case
of audiophiles, of course. For others,
it is the superficial aspects of music
that are important. I suppose that may
explain the success of “Rhythm” FM
stations…stations, as one wag has it, “for
people who can’t listen to music without
moving their hips.”
But earlier this year I came across a
clue to the mystery: why doesn’t every-
one get involved with music the same
way, and (by extension) why not all music
reproduction systems are “involving.”
When I’m on an airplane I don’t
buy the headphones and listen to the
airline’s canned music channels. But
when I was on my way to Vegas in
January, I brought along the magazine’s
iPod, chock full of albums encoded in
lossless compression. I also brought
along a pair of headphones with noise
cancellation: a little microphone picks
up ambient rumble and reproduces it in
reverse phase to cancel it out at the ear.
On the first aircraft, a Boeing 737, that
worked well. But after changing planes at
Detroit I found myself near the tail of a
767, and the headphones could no longer
do more than make a minor dent in the
noise level. The result was a disturbing
discovery. Everyone was singing out of
tune!
No, not really out of tune, but I could
no longer tell whether they were in tune.
I tried some recordings by singers whose
pitch I knew to be particularly accurate:
soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian doing the
songs of Pauline Viardot (on Analekta),
or Margie Gibson singing Irving Berlin
(on Sheffield). For all I could tell they
might be way off the right note. What
was going on here? Is this what it’s like
to have a tin ear?
Now I need to be careful here,
because “tin ear” is one of those epithets
you don’t toss off at anyone bigger than
you. It’s a value judgement and it will be
taken as such. I have a good ear for pitch,
and as an audiophile you almost certainly
do too. With the subterranean rumbling
of the 767, however, I was no longer sure
of the pitch I was hearing, and that made
music way less interesting.
I wound up looking for other music
and finally settled on the latest Coldplay
album, on which the dominant element
is — you guessed it — rhythm. And even
that wasn’t so hot.
This curious experience got me
thinking about a question that audio-
philes like to talk about: the ability of a
music system to deliver accurate pitch.
As nearly as I can recall, Linn was the
first company to talk about this, advising
listeners to try to repeat a melody in their
heads. The easier that was, the better the
system.
Now that piece of advice made critics
of the high end movement snicker, espe-
cially in the years since digital became
the common home music source. Now
that wow and flutter and other speed
variations are a thing of the past, how
can the pitch of the music be wrong?
It can’t actually be wrong, but it can
certainly be ambiguous. That was what I
experienced on the plane, and also what
I experience when I listen to a system
that doesn’t seem interesting. Maybe the
music is on pitch and maybe it’s not, but
you have to make an effort to tell one
way or the other.
And that realization brought me back
to a phenomenon I came across many
years ago: Shepard’s tones.
First demonstrated in 1964 (though
possibly it had precursors) by R. N.
Shepard, the tones are a series of notes
going up the scale, seemingly forever.
How is it done? Shepard used a computer
to manipulate the harmonic content of
the notes in an interesting way, so as to
make the exact pitch ambiguous. The
result is that you always know what
note you are hearing, but you lose track
of what octave it belongs in. You can
hear them at
Once the plane had landed I was
relieved to find that my sense of pitch
had recovered just fine, and the music
packed into my iPod was enjoyable once
again.
The fundamental building blocks of
music, which give music both its mean-
ing and its emotional impact, are melody,
harmony and rhythm. Muck them up, or
even make them ambiguous, and you’ve
just got less music. Either you need to
make an excessive effort to get involved
in what you’re hearing, or you can’t make
it out at all.
This wasn’t new to me, to be sure. I’ve
long used the word “musicality” to refer
to a system’s ability to communicate
music’s powerful message. You have too,
possibly. What the experience on the
plane gave me was a clue as to why some
systems with great specs can’t do it. It’s
not that they get the music wrong, it’s
that you can’t be sure if they get it right
or wrong.
columns from the first 60 issues
of UHF, with all-new introductions.
State of the Art
by Gerard Rejskind
0 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine