Bad sound is a vexation to the spirit

If bad sound was lethal, it would be a lead­ing cause of death.  Sound qual­ity and our sense of hear­ing is not given the atten­tion it deserves. It’s under­rated, regarded as sec­ondary to sight.  You just have to look at the pub­lic spaces, the hor­ri­ble things that archi­tects do, which is so intrin­sic to the ambiance of a place.

Let’s con­trast hear­ing and sight for a moment: Sight can only look for­ward.  Hear­ing is appre­ci­ated from every direc­tion.  Hear­ing never switches off, it’s always on, you could so eas­ily shut your eyes.  There’s only one octave for your eyes (the rain­bow) and audio can cover 10 octaves.  It’s also about 2,000 more times more accu­rate than the sense of sight in terms of the sep­a­rate speed of events it could dis­cern.  In gen­eral it’s not appre­ci­ated how this amaz­ing sense affects our mood and behavior.

A sound sys­tem is a chain of events and it’s only as good as the weak­est link.  Imag­ine your chain of events is a series of win­dows and you’re look­ing at a scene. You only need one dirty win­dow to destroy your clar­ity of view. I’m afraid this is how it is in audio. And if you don’t have a good ref­er­ence it’s hard to eval­u­ate the sonic integrity of any piece of equip­ment because the short­com­ings of one piece will mask the per­for­mance of another.

We’re not par­tic­u­larly sci­en­tists but there’s this thing called a mp3, and 320 kilo­BITS per sec­ond is sup­posed to be high qual­ity.  Audio res­o­lu­tion is nor­mally mea­sured in sam­ple rate and bit depth but when it comes to mp3s we don’t talk about that because there would be hardly any­thing to talk about and it’s mea­sured in kilo­bits per sec­ond.  A CD is actu­ally 1440 kilo­bits per sec­ond.  To pay proper respect to human hear­ing, it looks like we hear a min­i­mum of 96 kilo­hertz per sec­ond and a bit depth of 24, this trans­lates to 4,608 kilo­bits per sec­ond.  Now com­pare 4,608 with 320, the math is dead easy, it’s 7%.  So in other words it’s a com­plete and utter insult to what god has given us.

There are more ways of cor­rupt­ing ways of audio than we have time to dis­cuss but it all boils down to one hor­ri­ble word: Dis­tor­tion.  Dis­tor­tion could be thought of as a twist­ing of truth. And truth twisted is lies. And nobody wants to lis­ten to lies. So we’re not longer deeply involved in lis­ten­ing, we’re just super­fi­cially hearing.

My per­sonal taste is har­monic, tune­ful, key chang­ing, rhyth­mi­cally sat­is­fy­ing, uplift­ing music.  I believe that music is the expres­sion of the struc­ture and archi­tec­ture of the uni­verse, so I don’t do dark­ness and chaos.  The har­monic arrange­ments of every­thing, from atomic par­ti­cles to the plan­ets and the har­mony of musi­cal scales illus­trate this.  A nat­ural attrac­tion to har­mony and aver­sion to dis­cord stems from our sense of and our con­nect­ed­ness to the uni­verse. Nat­ural rhythms such as heart beats, breath­ing, day & night and the cycles of the sea­sons are all steady and life affirm­ing.  Unlike some of today’s rhythms, which if trans­lated to a per­sons heart beats would prob­a­bly hos­pi­tal­ize them.

Med­i­ta­tion is quite often an indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ence whereas lis­ten­ing to music is com­mu­nal.  And I would sug­gest when we have a magic audio moment, a really good gig, or a won­der­ful dance floor expe­ri­ence, it’s not just because of the music or your involve­ment in it, it’s cause we are start­ing to con­nect with peo­ple in the same dimen­sion.  That’s what makes it magic.  And that’s why this is so pre­cious.  It’s so impor­tant because it may be a door to an incred­i­bly badly needed new state of being that we need on Earth as soon as possible.