TRAINING REELS

Auditory Perception

by F. Alton Everest. Published privately; 104-page manual and four audio cassettes, $160. (Available from Mix Bookshelf, 2608 Ninth St., Berkeley, Cal. 94710; (800) 641-3349 in California, (800) 233-9604 elsewhere.)

Have you ever listened to the curious phenomenon called "low pitch," in which complex tones seem to have a slightly lower subjective pitch than pure tones of the same frequency? Have you ever heard a Mobius sequence, such as a progression of ascending tones starting at middle C and eventually winding up back at middle C? Have you ever experienced "difference tones"?

Can you explain how masking works? Have you ever used probe tones to explore your auditory system's network of critical bands? When you hear a violin tone, are your ears sufficiently trained to distinguish the third harmonic from the fundamental? How about the fifth harmonic? Not easy to hear!

How's your pitch discrimination, and how good are you at hearing distortion in loud and soft signals? Have you ever tried the famous experiment performed by Joseph Henry in 1849? (I know you have.) How about the experiment Helmut Haas did in 1949, to demonstrate the amazing Precedence Effect? Why are some sounds more pleasant than others, and how do consonance, dissonance, and critical bands relate to provide the answer? If any of these questions pique your interest, you can explore all of them, and more, in the audio training course Auditory Perception by F. Alton Everest. The course contains a 104-page manual and four audio cassettes, each of which includes two one-hour les sons. The book contains an introduction on the physiology of the human hearing system and eight chapters of information on select topics; its text duplicates the narrative on the tapes.

The book also supplies visual representations and graphs, while the tapes provide the listening tests themselves.

The tapes are chrome and are recorded in stereo with Dolby B noise reduction; their quality level is good enough to rarely interfere with the lesson at hand.

Author Everest, a veteran audio consultant and writer, has once again succeeded admirably in conveying difficult or intangible information in an understandable manner. His experiments, text, and sequence of presentation communicate a great deal of information in a short time. In addition, a bibliography and glossary invite one to further study.

While the course is not inexpensive, it is a small investment compared to that which many of us make in audio hardware and software. Surely it is worth the price to learn more about our most important audio component, our ears. As an educator, I am pleased that copies of the manual alone are available for $14.95. Now, if only Mr. Everest would try one more experiment: Publishing this course on CD-I.

That would be a revelation indeed.

-Ken Pohlmann

Introduction to Magnetic Recording

edited by Robert M. White. IEEE Press, 309 pp., $47.50; $28.50 to IEEE members.

This volume gives an overview of the technical side of magnetic recording.

The first section of 60 pages has seven newly written chapters: An introduction, and then chapters covering magnetic media, the recording head, the writing process, read-back voltage, the air bearing, and the recording channel.

The text is fundamental in character, with college-level mathematics and excellent illustrations throughout.

The second section of 240 pages is a collection of 38 reprints of articles that have appeared elsewhere. They are categorized in nine parts: General (2 papers), media (5), head fields (6), thin-film heads (6), written magnetization (8), read-back (3), noise (3), codes (3), and equalization (2). The reprints are reproduced in the format in which they originally appeared, which is an understandable choice to keep production costs down. As would be expected, some of the text is slightly hard to read because of faintness and small type size. But most of the papers are good in this regard, and the illustrations are generally very good.

Although there is emphasis on the non-audio topic of mass storage, the text does stand as a very good general introduction for those wishing to gain a deeper technical understanding of magnetic recording and its fundamental nature. The tutorial approach in the first section will aid the serious reader, and the reprints include a number of valuable sources that would be hard for most individuals to locate.

-Howard A. Roberson

I Remember--Eighty Years of Black Entertainment, Big Bands, and the Blues

by Clyde E. B. Bernhardt as told to Sheldon Harris. University of Pennsylvania Press, 270 pp.; hardback, $30, paperback, $17.95.

Clyde Bernhardt passed away shortly after his 81st birthday, only a few weeks before this book was published.

Being the subject of a book was quite an accomplishment for a player like Bernhardt, one of the legions of what I call jazz soldati, men of solid professional accomplishment who filled out the sections of dozens of bands, large and small, but whose names remain known mainly to jazz scholars.

During layoffs due to illness or just stretches of unemployment, Bernhardt took to his typewriter. He began put ting down on paper his sharp memories, going back to his North Carolina childhood and including all the events he had witnessed and taken part in during a rich life full of music and entertainment. He sought out author Sheldon Harris, whose Blues Who's Who (DaCapo Press) is a standard reference work in the field, and together they spent two years producing this remarkable autobiography.

As one who has interviewed hundreds of players of Bernhardt's generation, the second generation of jazz pioneers, I can attest to his most formidable memory. I knew him well and spoke with him often over a period of 15 years; never once was he not right on the money with names, dates, and places. He truly had total recall. It is all here in I Remember, easily one of the most valuable books on jazz that one is likely to encounter. Bernhardt's amazing memory and acute observations bring to life dozens of major and minor figures in the world of jazz and show business, many of whom had been to tally ignored until now.

As a boy, Bernhardt did errands for Ma Rainey, long before he had any idea of becoming a professional musician. He worked steadily from the early '20s until the bottom fell out for jazz men of his generation in the '50s. Then he just took weekend gigs while working a steady day job which enabled him to retire with a pension in the mid-'60s. His career was revitalized in the last decade of his life with regular club and concert dates and recordings here and abroad.

Never an outstanding soloist, Bernhardt nonetheless was hired by King Oliver, who preferred his reliable, sober style-and the fact that he read well and worked hard to make the band sound good-to that of the big contemporary names like J. C. Higginbotham. The chapter which discusses Oliver is particularly good, telling how well the New Orleans giant was still doing on tour as late as 1931.

Like many of his generation, Bernhardt had a high sense of honor. He often turned down offers from leaders like Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and others because he preferred the situation he was in, even if it paid less money. He also turned down offers in order to maintain his health after a particularly grueling tour of one-nighters, when he played with Jay McShann and had to double on two different books of trombone parts.

It was King Oliver who started him off as a blues singer in 1931. After that, and throughout Bernhardt's career, his blues singing led to good jobs and to the formation of his own bands, particularly his 1946 Blues Blowers. This band started off well, packing them in at Harlem's famed Smalls' Paradise, until the boss asked Bernhardt to cut down the band's size so the club could bring back its chorus line. Bernhardt refused. Soon he gave up his band in frustration, because of unscrupulous recording managers, booking agents, and club owners who contrived to take a good deal more than their fair share of his earnings.

Later, in the '60s, I personally witnessed the formation of the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, with Bernhardt as its leader, in Dr. Albert Vollmer's Larchmont, N.Y. living room. From there the band went on to various jazz festivals in Europe and to an extended engagement at New York's Ginger Man restaurant. All this without the benefit of an agent or "star" value, just good, solid jazz and blues.

Clyde Bernhardt left a rich legacy of music and he tells his story in a unique down-home manner. This book de serves to enjoy a wide sale.

-Frank Driggs

The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography

by Evan Eisenberg. McGraw-Hill, 272 pp., $17.95.

Although one might infer from its title that The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography deals with the recording industry, it is, in fact, a philosophy book which falls between a dozen-if not more-stools of thought relating to the arts and sciences. Unfortunately, it never comes close to the audio field in the process.

The book, which is a rambling exploration into a thousand quotes on the nature of art, science, and music from Plato to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Hanslick and Paul Ros, verified my suspicions as to why audio engineers and professional musicians seem to be wary of philosophers. They are too airy and vague, never getting down to the nitty-gritty facts.

In a magazine devoted to audio art, science, whatever-it seems to me that these words must be said. Our author, who studied philosophy (of course) at Harvard and Princeton, is an enthusiast and communicates his enthusiasm on every page; his database (card file?), out of most of the big names in philosophy and aesthetics, is enormous. But it is all ideas-and so little substance. Ideas, of course, are powerful, but in our day, in our civilization, they simply have to be tied to techniques, to the substratum of technology that is all-important in our life.

For instance, Schopenhauer announces to us that the deep bass is analogous to the lowest grade of Ideas, the brute mass of the planet from which everything else is generated. Ah yes, and the intermediate parts, the ripieno, represent the intermediate grade of the will's objectification. As for melody, it is man. By the next page, we are into Charlie Mingus and a bass-fiddle solo.

Eisenberg uses a common theme to tie the quotes together-namely, that phonograph music is different from live music. Some of us have been contributing thoughts on this subject for a half-century or so already-I was giving "phono-concerts," with no great success, in the late '30s at Princeton and have often used the term "phonography" when appropriate.

Eisenberg's choices of musical se lections to bear out his theories are all too predictable, whether they be from the standard-bearers of jazz, or from Bach himself. I almost cringed when I saw the "Toccata and Fugue in D Mi nor." What else? Of course: The "Air for the G String," as it used to be called, much to my music students' delectation. There is, in fact, quite a bit of Bach outside of these two works.

Hundreds of hours' worth, if you really want to get into the details.

As Mahler once said of his Eighth Symphony, "These are not human voices any more, but planets and suns circling." But how does one record planets circling? Ask Denon: One way is to use B & K microphones. The Re cording Angel says very little about microphones, or any other technical devices, for that matter. They do not belong in the realm of philosophical ideas.

-Edward Tatnall Canby

(adapted from Audio magazine, Sept. 1987)

Also see: Bookshelf, The (May 1983)

= = = =