#Find A Quiet Space to Listen As you prepare for Play With Your
Music, we suggest that you find a consistent, quiet spot to engage
with the course materials and recordings from week to week. In the
first few weeks of the course, you'll be spending a lot of time
listening to your own music and the music of others. Listening in the
same physical space with the same equipment will help maintain
consistency from week to week.
We also encourage you to listen using the best equipment you have
available to you. That might mean a set of stereo speakers, or high
quality headphones. Listening back to the audio files in this course
using earbuds or laptop speakers is not advised because they often
cannot reproduce the full spectrum of frequencies used in recordings.
We're starting this course by sharing with you a process of listening
deeply and critically to recorded sound. You'll want to hear all of
the tiny details in your own recordings and the recordings of others!
EVALUATE YOUR LISTENING SYSTEM FREQUENCY RANGE
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBtQmY2B5I]
To evaluate the range of frequencies that you can hear through your
listening system, click here (or on the above image)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBtQmY2B5I]to load a test video. This
video contains a test audio signal that sweeps from very low
frequencies ( < 10 Hertz [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz]) to very
high frequencies ( > 20,000 Hertz). To get started, we suggest that
you turn your volume down to about 30% and skip to the middle of the
video timeline. Once you hear the test tone, raise the volume until
you hear it at a comfortable level. Then, restart the video from the
beginning and take note of the approximate frequency when you first
hear the tone on your system, and listen for the last frequency when
you no longer can hear the tone. Use the frequency labels on the
horizontal axis of the graph as your guide.
This range of frequencies that your system can reproduce is not quite
the same thing as the frequency response
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_response]of your audio
playback system. Not all speakers and headphones reproduce each
frequency along the range evenly or equally. If you are interested in
the more detailed ins and outs of speaker frequency response, read
this article
[http://www.ecoustics.com/articles/understanding-speaker-frequency-response/].
For this course, the general rule of thumb is that listening in a
quiet, consistent environment with better equipment (i.e., wide
frequency range, and "flatter" frequency response), you will hear more
details and come closer to experiencing the recordings as intended by
the artists, engineers, and producers.
To get a better understanding of the frequency range differences among
various speakers and headphones that you might have, try the above
activity across multiple listening systems available to you (e.g.,
headphones, your laptop speakers, your home stereo, etc.). Share your
experiences with your learning ensemble. @Fredstuffcom suggested using
the following video to test both your hearing and your headphones
because it gives you the exact frequencies on the video. We agree!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE SCIENCE AND MATH BEHIND HOW WE HEAR SOUND
Mathemagician Vi Hart [http://vihart.com/] has prepared an amazing
video illustrating the scientific and mathematical basis of sound and
how humans hear and perceive sound. Check it out by clicking here (or
on the image below [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0])
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE584rBHIXQ]:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0]
Rock On!
- The #PWYM Team
