Different "ears" prefer different bandwidths?

[rasputin1963]

Remember our thread when we discussed women producer/engineer/recordists, and our Lee in Georgia suggested that women producers have more sensitive higher ranges (the better to hear babies crying in the night, probably). As a consequence of this, women eschew some of the higher bandwidths, preferring bass freqencies in their mixes.

 

Then we hear stories of veteran rockers whose ears are fairly ragged-out by decades of Marshall amps set to 11. Their productions, it is said, tend to have a harsh sheen on the treble (because they're dialing up frequencies where their hearing has suffered).

 

I suspect every human "ear" probably has preferred frequencies, no?

 

I just EQ'd a playback of some 1930's Big Band, using a 20-slider EQ.

 

I tried to gently dial out this "squawk" or that "pottiness", and to ease in that "thud" and that "sizzle".

 

I wonder how each of us here at SSS would've EQ'd this same Big Band recording for playback? Maybe the "sizzle" I like would sound harsh to some... (because to bring out treble frequencies of the trumpets, it also jacks up the natural surface noise/hiss on this old 1930's recording) Others might not like the grand "thump" of the string bass I dialed up.

 

Have YOU noticed that different names in the industry seem to have bandwidths they're fond of? Do YOU have an unusual quirk to your EQ? What is it?

 

Me, I love to hear the scrape of horsehair on violin and cello strings, and I love to hear the buzz of a reed in a saxophone, and I like to practically hear the spit in singers' mouths... as a teen I used to love to crank up the bass on everything.... Now that my ears are a little more trained, I understand how bass gain can really screw up the whole contour of a recording...

 

You?

[Beck]

Well I know women hear higher frequencies than men in general, but they are also moved by percussive bass frequencies in a different way. (uh, had I known this when I was younger I would have become a drummer).

 

My high frequency perception is unusually good for my age and gender... unusually good for someone 20 years younger so I

[Magpel]

Me, I love to hear the scrape of horsehair on violin and cello strings, and I love to hear the buzz of a reed in a saxophone, and I like to practically hear the spit in singers' mouths... as a teen I used to love to crank up the bass on everything.... Now that my ears are a little more trained, I understand how bass gain can really screw up the whole contour of a recording... You?

 

Interesting theory. I suspect your affinity for those kind of sounds is multifactoral and complex, much more than an appetite for a particular frequency band (and aren't the bands coarse arbitrary divisions of a seamless continuum anyway?)

 

I am thinking more along the lines of attack characteristics and timbral envelopes--which is to say that the frequency composition is not static. It's a dynamic frequency/amplitude/noise envelope that "plays" to a particular resonance sensitivity in your nervous system...in a good way, manipulating the pulse of the data packets in your spinal fluid or something! You should get an additive software synth such as Cameleon 5000 and see if you can't build your own "orgasm tone." Could be very useful in a pinch!

 

To answer the question a little more seriously, I am not aware of any particular frequency sensitivities or affinities I might have except that my high end is blunted and I do tend to over compensate--always looking for "air." And not finding it. Suffocating here...

[rasputin1963]

You should get an additive software synth such as Cameleon 5000 and see if you can't build your own "orgasm tone." Could be very useful in a pinch!

 

 

 

I do own the CAMELEON 5000!

 

You mean there's a sound/timbre/frequency that can induce instant orgasm in the listener? How does one find it?

[Magpel]

I do own the CAMELEON 5000! You mean there's a sound/timbre/frequency that can induce instant orgasm in the listener? How does one find it?

 

Ha, kind of a joke on the famous "Brown tone" myth--the idea that psychoacoustics, maybe better called neuro-acoustics, is so advanced that specific bodily functions can be triggered with sound.

 

...just as in the '50s (and well into my youth in the '60s and '70s) it was "common knowledge" that the malevolent "science" of advertising had progressed so far that it could manipulate virtually any response through the use of subliminals (see Vance Packard's book, The Hidden Persuaders--'member skulls in the liquor glass, virile men peeing in fur coats, all that sh*t? Single frame flashes of popcorn increasing concession sales?

 

Turned out to be hooey for the the most part, and the real peril all along was the ambient cultural effects of the 24/7 advertising bath we've all been taking since birth, not the pernicious cause-effect of one particular ad.

 

Vicary falsified the popcorn data. Key was the only one who could see SEX in the ice cube.

 

Oops, back on Topic...topic?

[Magpel]

I've read, however, the certain climatological, meterological and other more obscure logical conditions create certain long term historical resonant nodes nodes in which the earth, and presumably all sentient entities upon it, experience a period of heightened response to a particular frequency band. Thus the golden age of Hellenism and Rome, it is said, had a pronounced resonant rumble at 250 Hz whereas the Dark Ages, and most of the 20th century evince a striking Wide Q preponderance centered around 2.5 KHz...

 

Or so I've read. Not really though. Tedster told me this. No he didn't. Never mind.