Is this an audio group, a group for music lovers or an engineering group?

=== Andy Evans ===
Visit our Website:- http://www.artsandmedia.com
Audio, music and health pages and interesting links.

In article ,
Andy Evans wrote:
Is this an audio group, a group for music lovers or an engineering group?

With audio in the title I'd say it deals more with the hardware.

You don't need any interest in audio to be a music lover.

--
*Don't use no double negatives *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Andy Evans wrote:
Is this an audio group, a group for music lovers or an engineering
group?

Here's the group's charter...

http://www.usenet.org.uk/uk.rec.audio.html


--
Wally
www.artbywally.com
www.wally.myby.co.uk

"Andy Evans" wrote in message

Is this an audio group, a group for music lovers or an engineering
group?

As they say, audio is engineering, music is art.

"Andy Evans" wrote in message
...
Is this an audio group,


Yes, it says so on the tin......


a group for music lovers or an engineering group?


Ideally, elements of both to some degree, I would have thought, or what's
the point of subscribing here?


(Just testing to see if Pipex is still eating all my emails and/or
posts....)

"Keith G" wrote


(Just testing to see if Pipex is still eating all my emails and/or
posts....)



Great! That's my Debut turntable FS: posts gone west then!

As they say, audio is engineering, music is art.

....you can see engineering, you can touch engineering and you can measure
engineering but you can't hear engineering. Isn't hearing phenomena called
psychoacoustics?
"Psychoacoustics can be defined simply as the psychological study of hearing.
The aim of psychoacoustic research is to find out how hearing works. In other
words, the aim is to discover how sounds entering the ear are processed by the
ear and the brain in order to give the listener useful information about the
world outside.Some of the hot areas of psychoacoustic research at the time of
writing a
How do we separate sounds occurring simultaneously (e.g. two speakers speaking
at once)?
How do we localise sounds in space?
How do we determine the pitch of, say, a musical instrument?
How does the cochlea separate a complex sound into its different frequency
components?
Determining the abilities and limitations of human hearing is invaluable in
helping us to use sounds in our environment. Any device that produces sound for
the purpose of human listening should take account of what the listener's ears
are going to do with that sound. "

=== Andy Evans ===
Visit our Website:- http://www.artsandmedia.com
Audio, music and health pages and interesting links.

In article , Andy Evans
wrote:
As they say, audio is engineering, music is art.

"Psychoacoustics can be defined simply as the psychological study of
hearing. The aim of psychoacoustic research is to find out how hearing
works.

I am not sure that it would be sufficient to call these things (and some of
the specific areas you mention below) Psycho-acoustics. I'd add in a fair
bit of physiology and other rather more 'physical' sciences.

To pick just one example from your list.

[snip]

How does the cochlea separate a complex sound into its different
frequency components?

There has in recent years been a lot of *measurements* on this process.
These seem to have established a number of the physical mechanisms involved
in the hair bundles, etc. Goes some way to explaining some of the more
remarkable features of human hearing in terms of sensitivity, pitch
discrimination, masking, etc.

[snip]

Any device that produces sound for the purpose of human listening should
take account of what the listener's ears are going to do with that
sound. "

Alas, the above is at present a council of perfection since we are a long
way from knowing about or understanding all the relevant details of what
our ears and brain do in this process. We can only take into account
factors when we are aware of them. :-)

Hence we may tend to have to fall back on a more pragmatic approach. So,
for example, we can aim to ensure that a sound reproduction system would
provide the ears with the same pressure-time patterns as they would have
been subjected to if listening to the original sounds that have been
recorded or broadcast. Provided we can get near enough to this, we can
relax how much we have to know about the physiology and psychology aspects.

In reality, of course, having some knowledge of the physiology, etc, makes
it easer for us to assess when we get "The closest approach to the original
sound..." (TM ;- )

Slainte,

Jim

--
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Audio Misc http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/AudioMisc/index.html
Armstrong Audio http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/Audio/armstrong.html
Barbirolli Soc. http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/JBSoc/JBSoc.html

In article ,
Andy Evans wrote:
How does the cochlea separate a complex sound into its different
frequency components?

It doesn't - it's part of a simple microphone. The brain does the clever
bits.

--
*Why is it that doctors call what they do "practice"?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Andy Evans wrote:

How does the cochlea separate a complex sound into its different
frequency components?


It doesn't - it's part of a simple microphone. The brain does the clever
bits.


I woudn't argue that the brain does the clever bits, but the little I
have read about the subject shows that the operation of the cochlea is
nothing like any microphone I have seen, and is far from simple.

--
Nick