(no subject)

[catsittingstill]

I canceled recording this morning.  I have been sick enough for the past few days that I haven't even practiced, let alone picked out what I was going to be recording today and actually prepared.

Yesterday I actually got a lot of mixing work done, in the sense of mix for an hour, lie down for an hour, repeat, so I have mixed what I intended to do last week plus one other song.  I will see if I can get more done on that today too.  Ideally I would like to get several songs mixed and on my iPod so I can listen to them on my walks and perhaps on a drive in the car at some point.

I have noticed lot of even professionally produced songs come apart in the car as the noise of the engine and wheels and wind overwhelm certain frequencies that were important to having things sound in tune.  I don't know if anything can be done about this but it might be worth trying.

Comments

[gingicat]

Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about car noise.

I remember a long highway drive in which I listened to an Indigo Girls tape and it all sounded the same because the car noise was in the same exact range as their voices.

[catsittingstill]

I have had mp3s that sounded fine around the house but terribly out of tune in the car. Perhaps they just weren't in tune *with* the car...

[pbristow]

That's basically it, yes. =:o}

At high sound pressure levels, the response of the human ear becomes very non-linear: You literally get distortion happening *in your ear*, which means that whatever frequencies are coming in get cross-modulated with each other, creating a whole new bunch of frequencies. So unless all the original ones happen to be harmonically related, you end up with total mish-mash things with ambigous pitch. The ear/brain system judges the pitch of a tone mainly by the periodicity of whatever it finds going on within any given band about a third of an octave wide, but also by other cues. If you introduce a linear offset into all the frequencies of the musical tone you're hearing (which is basically what happens with cross-modulation: the two frequencies A and B combine to create new frequencies (A+B) and (A-B) ) then the cues start disagreeing with each other. The bigger the offset (i.e. the higher the frequency that was mixed in before applying distortion), the worse it gets. And because you've got *two* sets of offset frequencies, one pushed upwards and one pushed downwards, things get even more messy than with a single offset.

...And that's before you even start thinking about masking effects! =:o\

[randwolf]

Sympathies on the plague.

Not just pitch: simple loudness, I think. IIRC, radio stations compressed music for technical reasons, and this was favorable for noisy environments like cars. I'm surprised, thinking it over, that car stereos don't come with a compressor. Or perhaps they do--automotive electronics have gotten very sophisticated these days--and I don't know anything about it.

Some discussion here, treat as questionable.

[pbristow]

I don't know about these days, but certainly back in the 80s and 90s it was bizzarely assumed to be the responsibility of the people making the recording to compress it suitably for car playing. I looked for car cassette players with built-in compression, and could never find any. However, at least one British cassette deck manufacturer (NAD) decided to include a "CAR" button - which stood for "Compressed Audio Recording" - to be used when recording a tape that was intended to be played in noisy environments. They didn't actually *say* "use this setting to copy all your CDs onto cassettes for playing in the car", but that was clearly the intention. =:o}

[pbristow]

Oh, that article is terrible! They've completely confused the issue of dynamic comrpession with the "loudness" control, which was designed to make music sound louder when played at *LOW* levels - i.e. late at night, without you having to turn it up loud enough to disturb your neighbour in the next bedroom.

The first amplifier I owned - a 1970s design - had one of those, and I still sometimes use the same trick (via a stored preset on my MP3 player's graphic euqaliser) for listening to stuff late at night.

But that's totally irrelevant to the situation in cars.