On Fri, March 11, 2016 5:16 am, Brent Busby wrote:
> I've tried Sonic Visualiser, Baudline, and programs like that in the
> past looking for some sort of tool that could show why a mix has a the
> particular EQ balance or tone that it has. I've never really been able
> to express what it is I'm looking for in that regard, because usually
> when I try to explain it, the reaction I get is that I'm being naive
> about the way audio works.
I think the fundamental problem is that there are a lot of simultaneously
interacting events going on in any musical stream of sounds, and not any
obviously good or "correct" way to display that information visually.
Even when you pick a method to display visually, it is difficult to make
sense of what is presented, which means you have to learn how to use that
specialized tool, and in the time it takes to learn how to use that
(necessarily imperfect) tool, you could train your ears better (which of
course really means training your brain to interpret what comes in your
ears) so that you don't need a visual tool.
> if it's a real sonic property, you ought to be able to tease out the
> details with some kind of algorithm.
And you can to a certain degree, but a lot of the analysis leans more
toward what the subjective compression developers would use (e.g. for
analyzing audio when working with MP3, vorbis, AAC, etc.), things like
analysis windows that vary with frequency and time span, and then you
still have to learn how to interpret what those tools are telling you.
At the end of the day it isn't easier doing that than just spending some
time with an equalizer and seeing what effect boosting and cutting various
frequency bands have.
> Otherwise, when people use those
> sorts of terms about the properties of a mix, they might as well admit
> they're talking as much nonsense as I am, since any "warmth" or
> "thinness" or whatever that's naive to talk about showing up in any kind
> of fourier analysis is also probably not real in any sense at all.
There is also a bit of subjective taste involved, one person's "warm"
might be another person's "muddy," and one person's "thin" might be
another person's "clear."
> There may indeed be some properties of audio that are completely
> subjective voodoo, but my own sense is overall EQ balance shouldn't be
> one of them. It seems more like something that ought to be possible
> with some sort of spectrum and time analysis, somethine that is real and
> subject to mathematics, even if we might not have exactly the right
> software for that specific job.
Voxengo tries to do something similar to what you want.
http://www.voxengo.com/product/curveeq/
"Additionally, CurveEQ implements spectrum matching technology that allows
you to transfer spectrum’s shape of one recording to another. In other
words, this allows you to “copy” frequency balance of existing time-proven
mixes so that other mixes that are still in the works may have a chance to
sound better. This technology also greatly helps in music mastering since
it easily lessens any dramatic differences in the area of frequency
balance between various tracks."
-- Chris Caudle _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@email-addr-hidden http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-userReceived on Fri Mar 11 20:15:06 2016
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