Dear Community,

I am very pleased to announce the addition of another video lecture on topics of interest to performers.

Chris Ickler's talk on Psychoacoustics -- the science of what we hear -- is now available in several chapters for viewing.

Chris is a senior research engineer who has worked at Bose for 28 years.

Video Lecture on Psycho-Acoustics For Performers

This lecture video has been added to the L1 wiki.

We hope you enjoy it and will comment on it here.

With best regards,

Ken

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Ken-at-Bose,

Ken,
Thanks so much for bringing this excellent lecture to the forums.
This is a must see for everyone here, especially those who need *specs*.
It will open some eyes, and ears.

Hi Ken,

Thank you for making this available.



Hi Chris,

Thank you for making these concepts so accessible.

It was such a pleasure to see Chris Ickler's presentation again! (Eve - GREAT job in video editing! To all others - Thanks for your efforts in getting this posted here.) I felt privileged to have seen this first hand. Thanks Chris!

Ahhh...memories of Lit'l Switzerland...

That was wonderful...and a great demo...thanks for posting that! Only one problem...now I want two more L1s...thanks alot.

I thought the presentation was short on details and certainly short on Psychoacoustics.
The cocktail effect has been discussed adnauseum,
What about an in depth discussion of MP3 Codec and all the psychoacoustics employed.

Hi blkhol,

What details do you think were missing? Maybe we can beef things up.

Also, I didn't think the cocktail party effect was so commonly explained. Would you be willing to point me to the sources you are referring to on this subject? Again, I think they could help fill in the subject.

Chris can talk about the request about mp3 compression but I'm guessing he'll say that there are expert sources of great depth elsewhere. The Audio Engineering Society, for example, has been a very active venue for the research and development around this subject.

Ken

I hope my last comments were not misunderstood, I thought Chris did a nice lecture, but I only came away with two pieces of relevant info. 1. always trust your ears. 2. Buy a second L1 if you want to avoid masking.
What Chris started to explain and did not give the details to is how come we can hear the lowest note of a piano on a B1 if it only specs at 45hz.
He also started to allude to the enormous amount of Psychoacoustics used in MP3 format but sidetracked to the turntable which wasn't a psychoacoustic phenom, it was the illogic-logic of engineers missing something that was to obvious to see. although in a long winded way he made his most important point, your ears are always right!

Its obvious Chris has a lot to offer and could teach us all a lot about things we hear, I hope he contributes again.

quote:

Originally posted by blkhol:
... how come we can hear the lowest note of a piano on a B1 if it only specs at 45hz...

One minor correction: I think the B1 cutoff frequency is 40HZ.

As to why we hear notes lower than the 'fundamental' tone -- it's because the tones are not a pure, single frequency.

Just as our brain fills in the "blind spot" in our eyes, our brain "fills in" the fundamental frequency which corresponds to a set of overtones/harmonics. Read more at the Wikipedia article on Harmony in Musical Acoustics.

For example, the lowest notes on a bassoon contain almost no energy at the fundamental frequency. (Sidebar: To a lesser extent, most "natural" instruments have a much "richer" set of harmonics and overtones for their lower notes than they do their upper notes. That's partly why early synthesizers sounded really "un-natural", because they used the exact same "tone" for all pitches.)

Thanks for the correction Dan, I knew the answer to my question, just pointing out that Chris may have wanted to explain this in his lecture.

As for Ken's questions...

Well every documentary on hearing, every book on hearing, even past lectures in wiki always refer to the phenom of the cocktail effect. Just watch the discovery channel!

As for things to help musicians,
Loudness...big issue and some talk about ISO226
and how bass is never loud enough, the perception of highs and their resulting fatigue on the audience.

Masking, very interesting and useful to understand.

A little explanation about the logarithmic nature of sound.

Ken,

I think just a basic understanding of MP3 compression, and its foundation in Psycoacoustics would be very interesting and instructional to those musicians recording. The compression may effect their final product, so this insight may help us understand why were not hearing what we expected. Your L1 DJ's might want to keep this info in the back of their head if they run into tonal issues.

Hi Ken
I was sharing this with St and he (in true ST form) suggested I share it with you.
Louis our trombone player called to thank me for the link to the Cliff Goodwin, Chris Ickler videos. He uses a laptop and an in focus machine to show these videos in his music class.
I don’t know if it was intentional or not but these videos are teaching our future generation L1 users the art of LISTENING, probably the most important lesson a musician can learn. Louis believes this so much that it is now part of the music program at Elmvale High. You guys have started something here please keep up the good work.
Rick

“What Bose is doing, what all of us are doing, is conveying value beyond that which we can see in our immediate view.”~ST ) 06/25/2008

It's always great to hear what Chris has to say.
What a mind he has!! the amazing thing is that he makes it simple enough for us to understand.

Thanks, Chris, for sharing with us.

Rick

Fascinating stuff!

Thanks, Chris.

John