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Ear/Eye Relationship Oddities


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i'm assuming we are all in the same boat regarding watching bands from around 100' or so, more or less. i've gotten so used to this that when i see it other ways it seems wrong because my ear/eye timing is wrong. on the rare occasion i do go see a show i usually stand/sit behind FOH or in the general foh area.

 

one particular thing happened tuesday night that seems so odd to me even at the time that i cannot explain it; my brain told me that what i was seeing was late. i dont think that happens very often, especially since what i was seeing was live, onstage, and no video was involved.

 

i was recording a band ensemble, mid/side pattern mics within 20' of ensemble. i was sitting back around 130' behind glass and listening on my recording rig. the rig is not optimized for latency due to it not being important for what i am doing so the latency is in the 100ms area, maybe more or less. i was watching a timpanist on stage and listening to the phones, and due to the latency and distance involved i was hearing the timpanist roughly in real time (roughly 100ms delay vs roughly 100' distance) but something was a little off because my brain said the timpanist was visually late. :confused: as in what i was hearing was happening before what i was seeing.

 

i know that is not possible.

 

i also know it has to do with being accustomed to this inherent delay from standing at foh; i can see the drummer and hear the drummer, and after 20 years my brain puts the two together and says thats "correct"

 

i just find it really really weird that altering that relationship would cause my brain to interpret things even more wrong.

 

maybe i just think to much, but i do get a little bored hearing the same 50 tunes over and over.

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Interesting.

 

I don't experience that (I mix monitors a lot, as well my FOH is hardly a consistent distance from show to show), but I will agree that when I go to concerts I will usually sit or stand in an area near FOH.

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my foh is inconsistent distance as well. could be 70', could be 110'.

 

i think it has to do with "i'm seeing things far away so i should hear them at such and such time" and when that gets a little off something in our brains sends up a red flag. i experienced something very similar when watching a lineman reconnected the power transformer outside my home, the electricity turn on the INSTANT he reconnected the transformer, rather than the tim my brain told me it should take relative to his distance from me. it startled the hell out of me when the electricity came back on even though i was watching him the whole time.

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Timpani for me has been notoriously bad at tricking me with timing issues. For some reason it always seems that it's off visually, I think because of the physics of the sound. I dunno but in most live instances it looks weird to me.

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That specific kind of visual thing has never happened to me, but I have had instances of having mixed a Buffett cover band for so long and then going to see a solo act doing the same music, and in my head I actually "hear" all the missing lead guitar rifts, keyboard bits, percussion and even bass (although the bass can be attributed to the E string ringing on the acoustic). But it was kind of wild the first time it happened. And no, he wasn't running backing tracks. He did have a drum machine. But that pretty much sucks IMO. If I come to see a guy play solo, I expect to just get him and a guitar. Or him and a keyboard. Or him and a steel drum. Not him and a karaoke machine.

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think?

 

 

As a drummer, I can attest that one of the first things to be affected for me when I get really ill is my timing/tempo perception, so it's certainly in the ballpark of my experience.

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one particular thing happened tuesday night that seems so odd to me even at the time that i cannot explain it; my brain told me that what i was
seeing
was
late
. i dont think that happens very often, especially since what i was seeing was live, onstage, and no video was involved.

 

 

You're going crazy. You've got the flu. You're hallucinating. All three are possible explanations. Light travels at almost a billion feet/second. The audio simply can't beat it to your head.

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:freak:
Time to stop taking mushrooms before shows! D'oh!
:D

 

in my 20's yes, yes i did. in my late 30's not a chance. havent even had alchohol since july 3rd 2010 and no nicotine since december 6th 2010.

 

havent had "better" since i cant remember.

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Possible brain latency :-)?

 

From your OP of trying to explain the effect by guaging what you are "used to", Possibly you were right. Sort of the same thing as going 80 on the freeway for several hours and then coming to a stop (it feels like everything is going backward). Or reading a scrolling sign or the bottom of CNN and then looking up to notice that everything else is moving in the opposite direction. The brain is a funny thing (of course some peoples are funnier than others - like Chris Rock, Ribbin Williams etc.... :-).

 

You were right, the sound WAS early!

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