Is 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
80 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
by Gerard Rejskind
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-
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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 www.uhfmag.com/Tech/ Shepard.html.
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.
