I am hopeful this will make our July issue. I am late. July! Often I used to miss that month, and almost missed this. In times past, it saw our very thin nest product, what with manufacturers on vacation and the public in no mood to listen to hi fi. Nor, it would seem, to buy fi. Result: Our July mag had an uncanny tendency to blow away with the slightest breeze. I was seldom blown away because I often wasn't there. Not heavy enough.
No longer. And it is not our un doubted success in a busy field that has wrought the change, laudable as the thought may be. I suspect the transistor and, equally, the printed circuit and its successor the IC. They enormously widened hi-fi applications and usefulness, especially in summer.
Then came the big industry trade events such as the "summer" (i.e. spring) C.E.S., which sets an urgent early stage for the fi of the coming autumn season. Those big shows are not accessible to the public, so do you think all that stuff can wait? You begin to hear about it in July and continue right on through August and September and October . . . and then it's "winter" C.E.S. time.
So I hereby put aside my July lethargy in a hurry, if only to tell you that I have now discovered an important offshoot to a law that vitally affects every facet of our industry, Murphy's Law. This one is called Murphy's Sub set and states that if you correct an error in print you will make two more.
Murphy's Subset neatly tripped me in our May issue, where--of course-- I was correcting in print an earlier misstatement concerning the infinitely low S/N in the new digital recording systems. It exists, the residual or added noise, and I quoted my informant, reader Brian Berkeley, to point out that it is specifically determined by a digital formula having to do with significant bits.
Eheu, dolor! Murphy got hold of perhaps the most important single word in the Berkeley quotation, aided by myself, and the result was strictly according to the Subset. "Least" be came "last." In print it sounded plausible and to me the same, though quite meaningless as it turned out. The "last" significant bit.
Now I know better and thanks again to B.B. Go away, Murphy, while I explain. The admittedly very low S/N in digital recording is determined by the LSB of the particular coding system in use. Look out, now, let's not go wrong again. That's LSB, which is to say, the LEAST Significant Bit. LEAST, Mr. Murphy--get it? There is also an MSB, a Most Significant Bit, or sign.
But at least we may safely ignore that one. For the most part, anyhow. It's all a matter of getting used to the digital lingo.
I will be curious (see May) to find out how many of you will have caught this one and reported same to us. Too early at this writing.
While I am at it, I should report that in respect to June's "Audio ETC" and after a number of months of digital de lay combined with decode/enhance in my living room, the six-way system I described is a continuing success and on the way to permanence. Regularly now, for my own listening pleasure, I continue to check out each recording first of all with the delay unit (Advent SoundSpace) in the "direct" position, i.e. with no delay in the extra set of speakers, so that I may hear what the recording people had in mind as actually recorded in the grooves. (Decode/ enhance makes use of this information specifically.) Only then do I pick a suitable room size and a suitable degree of reverberation, both synthetic, to complement the sound of the re cording itself. It is easy and quick, and the more you do it the more unerring it becomes. No fumbling, no uncertainty. Just a brief listen, then a flick of the readout numbers to the right place, the right delay for that music.
The modest but very definite further enhancement of already-enhanced four-way sound is a pleasure for any musical ear. Only an occasional faint T-T-T-ttt as a scratch or tick goes by or I drop my pickup a mite too fast be trays the presence of all that sophisticated synthesizing circuitry--see Len Feldman in May.
Was It Murphy? A further curious and useful habit of this unit has cropped up since my last writing. I thought someone was using my equipment--the numbers on the readout changed. It seems, I now discover, that when you turn your system off the readout cancels as in any calculator or larger computer--but not to zero. Instead, when you switch back on again you find an invariable reading of 50, which is the halfway point.
In delay terms this corresponds to a room or hall of middle size, some where between a "chamber music hall" or studio and a large symphony hall, or the median equivalent in the synthesized spaces found in pop music. Excellent idea, and a good set ting to start with, making the going easy either upwards or downward, to smaller or larger synthesized space.
Somebody used his musical brain de signing this, for sure.
Speaking of concert halls and other halls for music, I have just been examining a piece I wrote some time ago in a brave attempt to get ahead of the game, even before my copy was actually due, and to store up some reserve, incidentally, in case of disaster or forgetfulness. Well, it never works. This one, it seems, just never got published at all. It went into the perpetual re serve file- So to heck with getting ahead, but I will mine a bit of it-
which means, of course, I will come out with something entirely different; I always do. No matter.
The Space of Sound
Music and architecture are one, or should be. Just as the product fits the market and vice versa, these two arts have developed side by side, and it is never easy to tell which came first, if either did. They have progressed coincidentally, though occasionally one or the other has taken the lead for the moment. Before we in audio came along, music was designed to be heard in a particular and suitable space, an architecture, and it wasn't ever the home living room as we now know it--most certainly not for a hundred sorts of large-scale music. Do you think operas were designed for Texaco? Or for "stereo" headphones or the TV? But all that is another story.
In the 17th century, they built sumptuous new-style buildings to house a new-(angled musical idea, the King's 24 Violins (Louis XIV) or equivalent in other up-and-coming royal pre serves all over Europe. Needless to say, these buildings were designed to suit the occasion, not only visually but with acoustics ideal for the music itself. If you have seen the kind of ornate elegance in which this music was heard, you know what I mean.
In Venice of the 16th century the peculiar architecture of St. Mark's Cathedral, many domed and Byzantine, prompted a whole school of multi-choir music that was imitated all over the continent. It was devised simply to take advantage of major per forming difficulties, a number of widely spaced but extremely cramped locations where musicians could be squeezed into place, not one of them big enough for the forces at hand. So why not use more than one, or all, and write different music for smaller groups of performers at each location, to be performed separately for a dramatic directional contrast or simultaneously for a marvelously wide "stereo" spread? Thus out of severe architectural problems was achieved what is now called poly-choral music, voices and instruments, the glory of works by the Gabrielis, A. and G., and others from Schutz to Brahms. Architecture determining the very nature of music.
In the 19th century this pairing of music and architecture, far from fading away, reached its most spectacularly successful level. This was the age of bigness, in all respects from wars to nations and empires, from roads and railroads to the Eiffel tower, from Beethoven to Mahler, and from small, intimate concert rooms to the vast spaces, holding thousands, that we collectively know as the concert hall. Right through the 19th century, until Tchaikovsky himself came over to dedicate Carnegie Hall in New York, that close relationship between existing music--the sound of music--and existing architecture remained the ever larger.
Soundless Spaces
Then came the modern age. For the first time in Western history, we now depend very largely on past music, of other times, for our concert fare. Not to mention our recordings--again an other story. And every year this past is farther diversified and extended. What about the architectural spaces? Should not each type of music be performed, at least in the live format, within the enclosure that corresponds or is close facsimile thereof? The big concert hall, the concert hall, as it happens is just fine for the prevailing (still prevailing) mostly-19th-century music that is played by our monster symphony orchestras, to the tune of giant deficits and enormous fund-raising campaigns plus government and foundation support.
Fine, that is, in the case of the older halls. Carnegie in New York, the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, Symphony Hall in Boston, even the quite-late Severance Hall in Cleveland, art deco rather than modern; also some others of the oldie type in our more recently settled West.
The big old symphonies that we of ten hear, the even bigger concertos, were designed for this type of extravagantly large hall out of the last century. The two grew up together, as al ways in the past, music and performing space united harmoniously. And it is not possible to say which was in the lead. Aiding and abetting. The original concert halls, of course, many more of them, are in Europe; the music, after all, is European, and until quite recently our own homegrown concert music followed the same tradition and be longed in the same space. Not until the 1920s did the hegemony of Europe begin to crack, at least for contemporary music. It began to try to move elsewhere. It is still trying. Where can it go? Does it have any close and enduring relationship with our present flourishing architecture? Not that I can see. Mostly, it just drifts back to the same old places or the same new ones.
Right along with the Tchaikovsky and the Brahms. Should it? Box office people think so. If you don't surround it with the familiar stuff, who'll listen? True, true. But in past ages contemporary music did extremely well, wherever, whenever. Or quit. Or tried a new tack. Survival of the fittest, an old-fashioned idea if Darwinian.
What, then, should a contemporary concert hall, brand-new, sound like? Obvious! Like Carnegie Hall or Sym phony Hall in Boston, to match the music inside it. Old fashioned. But al ways provided that it look modern, contemporary. That sort of two-way-ism accounts for the sonic disasters of recent memory--nobody really knew how to make the ears contradict the eyes in such an unheard-of way. We wanted the sound of yore, but heavens, we couldn't build a visible fake Carnegie or another Academy of music in molded plastic. Unthinkable! A modern building, first of all. And let the sound fall where it may.
I do go along with the idea that we should build modern. Today is for today. It's OK to restore or convert our existing older buildings but if we build anew, let's build US. We have one of the great periods of architecture at hand. We should indeed build modern. The sound is another matter.
Yeah, I know the proper formula for avoiding the sound/sight conundrum.
Build a concert hall in which "all" mu sic sounds good. Double--yeah. Just like those new pipe organs that play everything from early Baroque to late Music-Hall. Or the all purpose coffee grind I just bought. True, it works in any coffee brewer. And does a mediocre job in every one of them.
Mediocrity is the inevitable by-product of any all-purpose operation, no matter how high minded. Good music has very rarely been all-purpose--quite the contrary.
Nor, for that matter, architecture.
Imagine an ancient pyramid complete with Pharaoh plus built in tourist hotel and maybe a hockey rink.
So now we have the successor to the all-purpose concert hall, which has so often been no-purpose, though we have tried and still do. The successor is more honest, if thoroughly two-way.
Back to Square One! Here, indeed, is a hall that does look modern and sound old fashioned. This took some doing.
A miracle of sorts, all right. But (sorry, Avery) I still think the idea is truly a cop-out.
What we really need is a whole new kind of music to go along with our new spaces minus any sort of compromise, just as in past ages. Why not? How about Music for Office Building? Symphony for Small Exxon Station? Rhapsody for Underpass in E Minor? These should do it. Might even get a Concerto for Very Modern Concert Hall.
Next time you listen to the Best Seat in the Concert Hall via your new home fi, think on these things. What an impact they have had on our kind of music listening!
(Audio magazine, Jul 1979; Edward Tatnall Canby )
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