Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

Romy the Cat wrote:

Actually it is not about the “3D quality of silent passages” but about the silence being the PROPER continuation of the non-silent passages. I think I have cracked this one and thinking about it more I believe I have an answer to this quandary. I am making now very interesting experiments a as soon I get results with conformation of my finding and I will post the final conclusions on the subject in a few days.

As I said above I think I have figures out what is going on. First of all let define what I am taking about.

A performance at a serious level that futures orchestral silence might or might not have silence that is synchronized with performing event.  In some instances I recognized that some playbacks moderate the drama and commutability of silence. The question is what would be the mechanism so this moderation?

I discard the potency of a playback’s LF and ULF – it important for sound but it is not that MODERATE the commutability of silence. The quality of ULF and the reverberation time of the room do set it up but it is a static parameter and it has no dynamic aptitude.  I said that it shell be something else and it look like I was right.

A few days back I was listening a recoding that I know very well and suddenly I realized that Macondo did something different.  The eventfulness of the silences that I reported before was not there. As I said before I have miserable habit to emphasize to the playback problem that have identified and named and therefore the bacteriologicaly-active silence was unit the scope of my side-attention lately. So, noticing that silence was “different” I was very surprised and I asked myself what happen. The electricity was the same (PP2000 regenerator for whole system), not of the elements were changed for a long time, so what was different? Then it come to me – I was listening at 2AM and it might not be the sound of playback but the noise of the room that overrides the harmonics of the delays at low dynamic levels, injecting instead of the long orchestral collapse (with reverberation of 4s-5s at 50Hz) some aliens noised the come from street and that interfere with low level signal.

It does make since. The silence might be viewed as Sound at let say 40dB.  I live in downtown and during a day I have ambient city noise that might be at 40dB or even higher, particularly at near 20Hz. So, the orchestral collapse becomes a hostage of modulations from ambient noise of my room. During nigh I have 6dB-8dB quieter and it certainly makes silence less vulnerable to none-musical influences. This most likely would explain why I found that headphones are able to deliver more naturalistic continuation of musical intend in silence – because my headphones are ambiance-isolating type headphones. This also explains one of the most wonderful experiences I had from playback’s decay. It was 7 years back, here in Boston, in a very seriously built dedicated room and the room was sound-isolated with sub 15dB of own noise.

I decided to test this idea and I asked myself if it possible to actively turn off the LF alien inflictions by randomizing it harmonic influence. I took a separate LF speaker, generated white noise, band- filter it with 4th order between 10Hz and 50 Hz and fed it to the speaker via a phase randomizing devise. This way I had a LF acoustic dither that saturate room with noise but remove harmonics from this noise. Then I re-listen how Macondo is submerging it is it’s acoustic darkness. It was very different this time, day or night – all the same and in the way in which I would like it to be.

So, it looks that the ambianic harmonics of the listening room itself was the key. It is very easy to test if you listen how playback decays and open and close the doors to another large room. The redaction of LF room noise is very much the key, so the best orchestral decay would be in a city with no alive thing around, let say Chernobyl for instance…

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site