Why EQ a sound doesn't change timbre?

[BertKoor]

Not sure about your example.
On a forum text I don't care about these details (I just ignore them).
If I read a novel on a PDF or by original "hand-made" text perception CHANGE! Even the message from the author... seeing how author write letters and such.

So even the slightest change in the letters, from the change in rasterisation as text is scrolled, to variations in ambient lighting, that's what affects your emotional response to the writing?

And the words themselves, the sentences, they're not nearly as important.

Hmmm.

Last night I fully agreed with whyterabbyt, but this morning I understand where Nowhk is coming from.

One needs to understand there is a medium required to transfer the message / payload. First you judge the book by the cover. Your brain needs to adjust itself to unwrap the envelope and access the payload. The time this takes varies.

If I go to a concert there will be a moment where I become conscious of the room acoustics reverberations (part of the medium) but other times I just hear the instruments (the message). If I visit a new website I might first get upset about its stupid layout or styling (medium) but here at KVR I am not aware of styling anymore and focus solely on content. Then when I sit at an uncalibrated display I do get upset about wrong brightness / contrast.

My greatgreatgrandparent wrote a book in 1766, and when I first saw that I had to get used to reading the weird font with glyph f used instead of s. Not anymore after some time.

To be continued (train stops)

[whyterabbyt]

Not sure about your example.
On a forum text I don't care about these details (I just ignore them).
If I read a novel on a PDF or by original "hand-made" text perception CHANGE! Even the message from the author... seeing how author write letters and such.

So even the slightest change in the letters, from the change in rasterisation as text is scrolled, to variations in ambient lighting, that's what affects your emotional response to the writing?

And the words themselves, the sentences, they're not nearly as important.

Hmmm.

Last night I fully agreed with whyterabbyt, but this morning I understand where Nowhk is coming from.

One needs to understand there is a medium required to transfer the message / payload. First you judge the book by the cover. Your brain needs to adjust itself to unwrap the envelope and access the payload. The time this takes varies.

If I go to a concert there will be a moment where I become conscious of the room acoustics reverberations (part of the medium) but other times I just hear the instruments (the message). If I visit a new website I might first get upset about its stupid layout or styling (medium) but here at KVR I am not aware of styling anymore and focus solely on content. Then when I sit at an uncalibrated display I do get upset about wrong brightness / contrast.

My greatgreatgrandparent wrote a book in 1766, and when I first saw that I had to get used to reading the weird font with glyph f used instead of s. Not anymore after some time.

To be continued (train stops)

So far, Im not sure that you're disagreeing with what Ive said. At no point have I disputed the fact that a change in state of the medium cannot be discerned, quite the reverse.
I just dont correlate that level of change as being of significant enough importance to the recognition of the information contained on that medium, compared to any of the other factors. In fact the shift in attention you're describing is one thing I think I mentioned earlier; as soon as you start focussing on detail, your level of attention to the larger picture is lost and vice versa.

And since the way we perceive is reliant on error-correcting pattern-recognition, ie our memory is relied on to provide the expectation of the corrected errors, then the relationship between changes in the medium and the information is not just transient, and subjective, but its subject to normalisation over time, as individual instances become folded into reference memory.

[BertKoor]

OK, that's great feedback! At least we seem to be at the same page...

So we need a medium to transfer a message to the listener. To some extent you have control over that medium. That is: you can choose to publish on low-fi cassette tape, or upload to SoundCloud with crappy lossy mp3 encoding, or press vinyl and enhance the listener's experience with a nice 30cm folding album cover with pretty glossy printing of the lyrics and liner notes describing how you got Pino Paladino to play the bass and Bob Katz to do the mastering. All that can influence the listener.

But you don't have control over the hifi or lowfi the listener uses, while that also is part of the medium. (Side note: you can try though. I think it was a Lou Reed album that said in the liner notes it's best played at very loud volume in a very big room.) It's the responsibility of the mastering engineer to adjust the product such that the needle doesn't jump off the record, and the tracks you want on the same album sound consistent and not as if they were produced in entirely different studios.

A few pages ago there was a YouTube example of different guitar speakers. That is all about the artistical choice you have as a musician / producer. You can make it sound like you want with all the tools and means you have available. So that is about the message you want to send, not the medium.

There also was a PA speaker shootout video. Here you're influencing the medium, not the message, and you want that medium to be as much transparent and non-existing as possible. Colour & brightness correction of The Matrix is also about changes in the medium, not the message.

So the listener (often uncounciously) can discriminate the medium from the message. Unless the medium is obfuscating that message too much. And as a producer you do have some control over the perception of that message. If I create a vocal piece only accompanied by a piano, the chance of a listener hearing exactly what I wanted to put in is quite large. If I use 100 tracks simultaneously with layer upon layer of details spread across the whole spectrum, then the listener needs to focus on those details in order to really hear those tiny details. So then you give him/her quite a challenge to make sense of the bricks in the wall of sound. It's me, the producer, who has constructed that wall and put in some very big stones and lots of smaller stones. The mixing engineer (or bedroom producer) is responsible for aligning these bricks so they make a nice wall, and EQing each track so they don't result in mud.

Perceiving what you hear needs to be learned. Proof is the questions asked here weekly: how do I make this simple synth patch? Or what is that "organ" sound in this song? And then the answer is: that's no organ but a Fender Rhodes. Someone else says: that's not a Rhodes but a Wurlitzer e-piano. Can't you tell the difference, you stupid? Apparently some of us can't

[ghettosynth]

A few pages ago there was a YouTube example of different guitar speakers. That is all about the artistical choice you have as a musician / producer. You can make it sound like you want with all the tools and means you have available. So that is about the message you want to send, not the medium.

Yes, or, said differently, when you start talking about electric guitar, the amp, speaker, and associated electronics are really a part of the instrument.

That said, timbre is timbre. What arrives at your ears is the data that you have to distinguish between some other set of data that describes a different timbre. To that end, I'm not seeing the point of distinguishing between message and medium. All aspects of the medium apply their transfer function to the message before it arrives at your ears.

I'm still not seeing what the OP is banging on about TBH. I remember as a child falling in love with the timbre, specifically of certain songs. One that I can clearly remember and still love to this day is Wings "Band on the Run." The timbre changes in that song are clear to me and drive the same emotional response whether I listen to it on the shitty gear that I had growing up, or on the stuff that I have today.

So, as has been said over and over again, yes, everything that audio passes through has some impact on timbre, so what? That doesn't make it some ridiculously variable experience. In fact, as I've said repeatedly, that variability largely falls under the noise floor of interest when compared to the timbral characteristics of interest. The guitar tone of "Reeling in the Years" comes through on practically any medium you can imagine. However, it should be especially clear on virtually any studio monitor system in almost any room, even it it's untreated.

Yes, there are exceptions of extreme that can render something unlistenable. I can't stand listening to music at warehouse parties where there sound is too small for the space. That doesn't mean that I don't recognize the music or won't remember it without the reverb. The timbral changes of Band on the Run will still come through, drowned in shitty large room reverb. However, to try to say that this means that somehow I'm participating in the creation of that music is absurd. Particularly if one thinks that these kinds of experiences should have any impact on the process of creating music.

I still don't know what the OP is trying to understand or trying to accomplish?

The timbre of any recorded work played in some environment is always going to be the same at some point X in that environment when measured by reasonable test equipment and assuming that we are sweeping the effects of things like outside temperature and humidity under the rug. If you stand at X, you will get the same experience every time. This is obvious. What you perceive is also a function of your own state and that, for the most part, can't be measured. The fact that there are an absurdly large number of points X and near infinite environments that could be defined doesn't change the fact that if you choose almost any one of them at random, Band on the Run will always have those cool timbral changes, EVERY...SINGLE...TIME!

Now, maybe those changes have no impact on you, ok, that doesn't mean that they're not there. They are, and they can be quantified and identified and, even if you had never heard them before, once defined, you will be able to hear them given that you understand the quantification and have sufficient sensitivity to such.

There's no point in caring about that one time that someone chose to play Band on the Run on a Victrola inside of a water tank with an alligator tooth superglued where the needle should go. By the time the system is so shitty that you can't sense the timbral changes, you may not even be able to recognize the song.

So, I still contend that without a goal, without some understanding of what is meant by "change", that this conversation is just going around in circles about nothing.

[Nowhk]

For "my perception" it seems that ghettosynth is just a troll here.
For "your perception" it seems that I'm a total noob that isn't on anything.

This all depends by my english expression I believe. I write down N times what is my dubt. I think the way we italian generally "speak" about hypothesis is different from your. From now, I will try to not "claim" anymore in the way I would do speaking with my native language. I'll try to put only questions.

Some notes:
I'm not here for "claim" somethings.
I'm not here for "find a solution".
I'm not here for say to you "you stupid mfs, making music has no sense, why did you do it?".
I'm not here for be "bragger" against your skill.

I'm here for understand HOW things (in the end) works. Is it so hard to catch from my words? Daamn... if only my english teacher could read this...

Write down a line, retry, and go ahead...
_________________________________________________________________ (<< this is the line)

I'm producing & mixing music since I was 14 (thus, I'm not here with this topic to learn guitar riff or lessons of mixdown). From vst to (recently) modular synth approach. Some years ago I'm entered in the world of DSP: what a rocket science! It does change my life, and also the way I "listening" to music.

Working on some own plugins, I got the habit to listen "deeply" to the sound they are making. Involuntarily, I've started to do this also on basic production I do and on every other music we have within the world where we are living (from Rolling Stones to Squarepusher). I only DO heavy electronic music: noise/glitch/ambient/core.

So, lets doing an example. I go to my studio, I open up my favourite subtractive/addictive synth, and let start to making a kick: complex waveform with a custom decaying sweep envelope modulation for pitch; than sidechaining (better to say "ducking") another background layer, having harsh sound on high frequencies (it will be the tail of the kick). Tweak it for hours and hours, and finally get the "sound" I like. Now let doing a track around it (yes, I do glitch music); than a fancy mixdown, a bit of mastering... and I've sculpt my "final" product. Fantastic!!!!

Now, lets listening to it on setup A (pro loudspeakers; yes, major of people listen to music not on flat studio): it gots emphasized higher and soft transient. My brain "build up" (because sound I perceive is made by brain, from stimulus and memory) a sound that is soft on punch and metallic on the tail, on EVERY beat within a pattern. (on a 4/4: soft punch/harsh tail soft punch/harsh tail soft punch/harsh tail soft punch/harsh tail).

Change setup, go to setup B (another pro loudspeaker; notice I want to hear the human frequencies range, and its able to do this, as well as setup A). It has hard transient and higher bass/medium than treble (i.e. different frequency response, and more decaying ringing; "Big boost to the bass is common", as jancivil correctly stated). My brain "build up" (because sound I perceive is made by brain, from stimulus and memory) a sound that is harder on punch, with heavy bass, and a bit muffled on higher; a sound resulting more "power" than the other on a 4/4 pattern: powah punch/strident tail powah punch/strident tail powah punch/strident tail powah punch/strident tail.

its not really a revolutionizing difference, but the pair punch/tail differ a bit (on transient and timbre). Of course it COULD trigger different emotions, being different sound perceptions.

Now, I turn up my head, to the sky, looking at god, and thinking: uhm... so what I've done, in the hell, as producer? Switching to two different setups, I got two sound perception (what I call messages). Which will trigger of course (with the same bio/status) different emotions.
PLEASE: don't confuse this to my lacking of experience. The same happens with any track I'm listening (from Rolling Stones's Charlie Watts drumfill to Squarepusher badass electronic kicks).

I go than to KVR, asking "what the hell is happening?", placing as example the timbre, for its "changing" sound aspect (because I consider it the most recognizable).

After 12 pages of very few cues (feeling accused to be a total idiot which know nothing), now I (re-re-re) ask to you (considering a fixed listener Steve, as me, not the different perception by people):

is the perceived "sound" (build up by my own brain on different listening) really different or is it just a BIAS?

If the answer is "yes, it is going to be perceived different (even if slightly) every time": what's the purpose of making "sound (thus, music, in the end)" if I won't never catch the same sound/perception (which wrap the message) every time? (notice: that's my old hypothesy of "putting just "bases" and hope in variances").

If the answer is "no, your brain build up the same sound/perception every time": can you give to me some books/abx test/articles/examples/whatever you want to proof that my different sound perception due to environments are just hallucinations?

I really can't be more clear than this now.
I cross the fingers...

[BertKoor]

What you describe here is what we call whether it translates. That means the payload should not be too different when played on various speakers.

You create by definition on non-flat speakers. Usually you over- or under-compensate the message to get clear through that medium. So the trick is to average it out, finding a compromise that translates well across a variety of speakers. So take the medium out of the equation.

Triggered emotion is always out of your control, since there are lovers and haters. So emotion has to go out of the equation.

Repeat: all speakers are different. This is out of your control. In your studio you cannot get bass so loud that it makes your trousers flap.

So it is a bit of a gamble. Not a problem, but fact of life.

So what Make music and have fun. Live long and prosper.

[slipstick]

If you play the same thing on a different system, different speakers etc the ACTUAL sound will almost certainly change to some degree. Suitably calibrated instruments could measure the changes. But the PERCEIVED sound in your brain may or may not change depending many things including how different the actual sounds are and how carefully you are listening.

But what does that have to do with "the purpose of making sound/music"? The purpose of making music is to make it available to many people who will listen to it on many different systems, all out them of your control. Isn't your job to produce something that sounds as good as possible for all those people taking into account the fact that you can't control their listening environment etc.?

Steve

[himalaya]

is the perceived "sound" (build up by my own brain on different listening) really different or is it just a BIAS?

The "perceived sound" will be different across different playback systems. This is ok. This is how it is and how it should be (due to the design of different playback mediums).

If the answer is "yes, it is going to be perceived different (even if slightly) every time": what's the purpose of making "sound (thus, music, in the end)" if I won't never catch the same sound/perception (which wrap the message) every time? (notice: that's my old hypothesy of "putting just "bases" and hope in variances").

You make music, produce it, mix it, master it, release it. What happens after that is out of your control. You will never be able to ascertain if the listener is actually able to "catch" whatever "message" you have imbued your music with. It's out of your hands.

In other words, if your music track was meant to stimulate your listeners with great emotion, you just do not know if this will happen, regardless of the playback medium. Should you worry about this? Not really. You have noticed that music played on Speakers A differs to Speakers B? That's ok. In context of how people perceive music on the emotional level, this difference is a non-difference and should not prevent you from making music.

what's the purpose

You make music to fulfil your drive to make music. Make the best music you can. Produce it in the best way you can. Give it to others to mix and master, so that it can sound even better, But after that....once the music piece you have created is released it's out of your control how it is received. There is virtually nothing you can do to make sure that whatever 'message' your music contains is received and understood by your listeners, regardless of the speakers used.

Now, when I listen to a song which affects me deeply on the emotional level, I can experience this emotion when listening on cheap laptop speakers and expensive studio monitors? Why is this? The song will sound drastically different on both playback mediums and yet I get affected in the same way?

This is me though, and I can certainly imagine that another person would stop when listening to the song on cheap laptop speakers and say, "my gosh, this song sounds crap on these laptop speakers, I can not stand listening to my favourite song like this!"....and that's fine. Remember: It's out of you control how people will react to your song on various playback systems. Some will be ok with listening to the song on different speakers and will still 'get' the song (despite the mix coming across differently on various speakers). Yet, others will stop and be troubled by this difference. You can't help it. Just let it go.

[ghettosynth]

PLEASE: don't confuse this to my lacking of experience. The same happens with any track I'm listening (from Rolling Stones's Charlie Watts drumfill to Squarepusher badass electronic kicks).

I go than to KVR, asking "what the hell is happening?", placing as example the timbre, for its "changing" sound aspect (because I consider it the most recognizable).

You lack experience. Period. If you had more experience then you would understand that the differences that you imagine are there don't matter as much as you are trying to claim that they do. Certainly they should not lead to a crisis of musical identity.

Every speaker system in every different environment is different and will color sound, how many times do you have to be told that? Why is it so challenging for you to extend this to realize that there are almost zero absolute shared speaker listening experiences in the world? Everyone will hear something slightly different on their different systems given their different location with respect to the speakers. The only thing that provides something close to uniformity are headphones, assuming a common make/model, and even those are going to be impacted by human physiology.

Now, given that, why is it so challenging for you to realize that given these differences there absolutely are many shared perceptions? Two people at a concert in different places in the hall will hear something slightly different. Yet, people can still talk about how amazing a concert was.

After 12 pages of very few cues (feeling accused to be a total idiot which know nothing),

Everything that you have posted in this post has been covered. There is nothing new in your post nor anything interesting in your perspective. Your arrogance is somehow preventing your from absorbing the material that's already here.

is the perceived "sound" (build up by my own brain on different listening) really different or is it just a BIAS?

This is unknowable. You haven't defined enough parameters and even if you did, it wouldn't matter. You are, ironically, almost certainly biased by this very thought process. You are convinced that something matter here when it doesn't. That bias can impact what you hear. You are, in the most classic way possible, making mountains out of molehills.

If the answer is "yes, it is going to be perceived different (even if slightly) every time": what's the purpose of making "sound (thus, music, in the end)" if I won't never catch the same sound/perception (which wrap the message) every time? (notice: that's my old hypothesy of "putting just "bases" and hope in variances").

That's a non-sequitur. Stop writing and start reading, you have more to learn than might be possible in your lifetime if you continue to ignore valid advice from others as you've been doing in this thread. It's not your language that's getting in the way, it's your arrogance. You're simply wrong and the sooner you get to an acceptance of that, the sooner you'll be able to move forward.

Millions of records have been made by millions of producers that have made the artists and record companies billions of dollars, untold critical acclaim, and frankly, history. Records have managed to make history and all the while, who knew that speakers impacted the timbre on playback?

You know, given the ridiculousness of your claims, it seems to me that this has all the earmarks of a classic troll-post.

If the answer is "no, your brain build up the same sound/perception every time": can you give to me some books/abx test/articles/examples/whatever you want to proof that my different sound perception due to environments are just hallucinations?

We've already given you a lot of food for though, with references. You need to stop being lazy and do your homework. That said, nothing will give you the "proof" of your bias, that is, for all intents and purposes, impossible because it requires your brain, which is intrinsically biased, to draw the conclusion. To the extent that anything can be understood to mitigate bias, you've already been given that. Simply follow best mixing/mastering practices.

Know your speakers
Know and treat your space
Mix at low volumes
Use reference tracks
Allow your ears time to rest between sessions

You know, this is the main reason that you should use a mastering house if you are serious about releasing your music, it's one of the few times you will get someone unfamiliar with your music to pay attention to the details. In addition, they will be listening to it with different ears on a different system and in a different room.

I really can't be more clear than this now.
I cross the fingers...

You haven't said anything new. You don't seem to understand that it's your arrogance of belief combined with your ignorance that's getting in the way of your understanding. Nobody here can give you an answer until you gain the experience and education to understand the answers ALREADY GIVEN. Moreover, once you do, you will realize that this entire thread has been one empty and pointless assertion after another, and the question really didn't need to be asked in the way that you asked it in the first place.

[BertKoor]

I wouldn't call it arrogance if someone just can't grasp the message that's tried to being delivered. Imho it just means it has to be explained in yet another way, and againm and again, until it IS understood.

[ghettosynth]

I wouldn't call it arrogance if someone just can't grasp the message that's tried to being delivered. Imho it just means it has to be explained in yet another way, and againm and again, until it IS understood.

The arrogance is in the assumption that he is correct in his conclusions and that the only problem is that people don't understand his POV. From the very beginning it hasn't been posed as a question, rather, an arrogant claim born of ignorance. Even the thread title was intentionally misleading.

[Nowhk]

But the PERCEIVED sound in your brain may or may not change depending many things including how different the actual sounds are and how carefully you are listening.

The "perceived sound" will be different across different playback systems. This is ok. This is how it is and how it should be (due to the design of different playback mediums).

This is a concern for me: if a song (i.e. basic definition of music) is sound organized in time, and this "perceived sound" change across medium, this imply that there isn't any fixed produced "song". Again, for ME and ME only; not reasoning about differences between what me and you perceive.

As I said before, if I listen the same song on Setup A and B, and I define for both the "organized sound" I perceive, I can't really say "I hear the same song" on different listening, because the perceived (organized) sound is changed on each listen.
So producer/artist have worked on which "organized sound" (i.e. song) exactly? (this I meant with "what's the purpose of...").

You have noticed that music played on Speakers A differs to Speakers B? That's ok. In context of how people perceive music on the emotional level, this difference is a non-difference and should not prevent you from making music.

I'm really not sure about this. Are you saying that differences on medium can't change things on emotional level?

The arrogance is in the assumption that he is correct in his conclusions and that the only problem is that people don't understand his POV. From the very beginning it hasn't been posed as a question, rather, an arrogant claim born of ignorance. Even the thread title was intentionally misleading.

Don't you have any child or puppy to take care instead of waste your time with an arrogant/ignorant/stupid/idiot like me?

[BertKoor]

I'm really not sure about this. Are you saying that differences on medium can't change things on emotional level?

Yes! At least: should not. But the world is complex so in practice it happens anyway.

The medium should not distort the message too much. Otherwise it is not usable. Transparency of the medium is important. But there is no such thing as 100% transparency. We discussed this soooo many times already....

If you cannot distinguish the medium from the message, there are problems expected.

[whyterabbyt]

If the answer is "yes, it is going to be perceived different (even if slightly) every time": what's the purpose of making "sound (thus, music, in the end)" if I won't never catch the same sound/perception (which wrap the message) every time? (notice: that's my old hypothesy of "putting just "bases" and hope in variances").

Clearly, if noone can ever 'catch the same sound/perception' then there is absolutely no purpose in making sound.
And since there's no human endeavour not subject to the same issues, everyone should stop doing everything.

I mean its not as if there's the tiniest chance that the audience not catching a 100% identical sound/perception is not the one single factor which determines whether there is a purpose to making sound in the first place.
Its not like we would make stuff for the art of it, or the joy of it, or anything like that, or that we or the audience dont actually care about that small variance in perception. That would be ludicrous.

I guess that's the end of the discussion. I'll be leaving KVR now, setting fire to my studio, and leaving society to become a hermit. I'd advise you to do the same. Thanks for your contribution to the revelation that all attempts at human communication are rendered void, utterly negated by slight deviations in the medium.

[slipstick]

As I said before, if I listen the same song on Setup A and B, and I define for both the "organized sound" I perceive, I can't really say "I hear the same song" on different listening, because the perceived (organized) sound is changed on each listen.
So producer/artist have worked on which "organized sound" (i.e. song) exactly? (this I meant with "what's the purpose of...").

If you mean that you cannot guarantee that what you hear will be exactly the same as what the producer was hearing when s/he decided that the song was finished then you're right. And that will be true even if it's your song and you're listening to it later on a different system or even on the same system but with the environment changed e.g. a door open, more people in the room or you sitting in a different position. And even if by some coincidence you did hear exactly the same sound you still may not feel the same about it because that has to do with your state of mind at that instant and that too may be different.

All of that is completely obvious to most of us but we see it as simple reality and not as any sort of problem. If this is a real problem for you then I can assure you it will never get better. So for the sake of your sanity you should immediately give up making or listening to music. And it would be a good idea not to do anything else vaguely artistic either because e.g. you will never be able to see a painting in exactly the same light, position, state of mind that the artist had when s/he painted it.

Steve