Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals

✍ Scribed by Everest F

• Publisher: Artistpro
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 217
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Audio productions are made or broken by the quality of the recording engineer's ears. The ability to properly discern sounds, identify subtle problems, and act accordingly to apply the necessary fix makes all the difference in the quality of the final tracks and master. The good news is that these crucial skills can be learned. The ability to instantly identify frequencies, hear hidden distortions, and instinctively reconcile conflicts in the EQ of instruments, audio elements, vocals and more are traits of those who have mastered the art of audio production. The best engineers have trained their ears to immediately recognize audio problems that the consumer and those new to recording arts would likely not hear, but that, if left unresolved, would result in an amateurish final product. For more than two decades, students of F. Alton Everest's Critical Listening and Auditory Perception courses have rapidly developed these skills by using the intense lessons found in this book and on the CD. Unfortunately the books and CDs included with the course were usually too expensive for aspiring engineers to purchase and were often available only in colleges, universities, or school libraries. Now for the first time these indispensable training sessions are available with this release of Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals. Through hundreds of illustrations and an accompanying disc containing high-resolution MP3 files with nearly five hours of narration of the entire course, you can acquire the audio discernment skills of a seasoned recording engineer by studying this course at your own pace, in your own home.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 7
Preface......Page 9
BOOK 1 Critical Listening......Page 10
Technical Support......Page 11
Lesson 1 Estimating the Frequency of Sound: Pure tones and random noise......Page 12
Lesson 2 Estimation of Sound Level Changes: Tones, speech, and music......Page 26
Lesson 3 Estimating Frequency Band Limitations: Music, male and female voices......Page 34
Lesson 4 Frequency Response Irregularities: Their effect on music and speech......Page 44
Lesson 5 Judgment of Sound Quality: Simple and complex sounds......Page 54
Lesson 6 Detecting Distortion: What it is and how it sounds......Page 62
Lesson 7 Reverberation Effects: On speech and music......Page 72
Lesson 8 Signal Versus Noise: Their interrelationship......Page 80
Lesson 9 Voice Colorations: How they sound and what causes them......Page 88
Lesson 10 Listening With Discernment: A review......Page 100
BOOK 2 Auditory Perception......Page 108
The Function of the Outer Ear......Page 109
Localization Cues From the Outer Ear......Page 110
The Function of the Middle Ear......Page 111
The Function of the Inner Ear......Page 112
Protect Your Hearing!......Page 114
Use of Loudspeakers and Headphones......Page 116
Unit 1 Loudness, Pitch, and Timbre: The subjective correlates of sound level, frequency, and spectrum......Page 118
Unit 2 How One Sound Masks Another: A study of critical bands......Page 130
Unit 3 How the Ear Analyzes Sound: Auditory filters at work......Page 142
Unit 4 Non-Linearities in the Auditory System: Distortions generated in the ear......Page 152
Unit 5 The Perception of Delayed Sounds: How we hear echoes and reflections......Page 160
Unit 6 Why Some Sounds Are More Pleasant Than Others: Consonance, dissonance, and the critical band......Page 172
Unit 7 How We Locate Sounds: The head, the pinna, and an amazing computer......Page 182
Unit 8 True Binaural Listening: The dummy head in binaural recording......Page 190
C......Page 196
I......Page 197
P......Page 198
S......Page 199
W......Page 200
Bibliography......Page 201
C......Page 204
D......Page 205
F......Page 206
L......Page 207
M......Page 208
P......Page 209
S......Page 210
T......Page 211
W......Page 212
CD Track List......Page 217