roachboy

ok so first off i dont understand the noise/emotion distinction at all, will.

in the end, this is little more than a question of personal taste--i know this--but i find that sound/music involving sheets of radio static (for example) can also be very emotionally involving--just as i have found more music than i can remember that is quiet and sparse that makes me reach for my revolver. in a sense....what allows music to breath is not necessarily a matter of volume on its own: pitch selection and placement are basic...and players who have reached the level where they understand that what you do not play is as important as what you do play (miles says this in his autobiography--others have as well, but i always associate it with miles. and i like his early 70s electric stuff more than i like the quintet music from the late 50s, including kind of blue (sorta)--so miles was quite flexible in terms of the contexts within which he would deploy this understanding of playing. younger players tend not to get this thing about silence, about not playing everything.)

the engineering question raised in the op seems more about the dominance of a particular style of mixing/mastering than about that style itself.
there are many problems that run along with this:

who decided that a "natural" instrument sound requires that the micing position the listener inside the instrument to the complete exlcusion of the space within which the instrument is being played? when did this become standard?

if you listen to the classic blue note recordings of the early 60s, they are about rudy van gelder's living room as much as they are about what was being played in van gelder's living room. the sense of depth/space in these sound images is generated by microphone placement and a decision not to defeat the characteristics of the acoustic space within which they are placed.

and an instrument is played in a space: the sound deploys in a space: it is not some abstract phenomenon that is always the same regardless of where it is played. sound is about the space within which it sounds as much as it is about itself.

if you decide to close mic everything, you cant create a comparable sense of space by turning up the results. trying to do this indicates that the engineer has a limited notion of "presence" and is imposing this notion of the sounds he manipulates. you get a kind of shabby, predictable two-channel image. (you could run the same criticism through conventional notions of where the interesting elements are in a pitch--most recordings seem to operate as if the interesting stuff is in the attack--i think everything of interest is in th e decay patterns, but that may be the sort of thing a pianist would say)

maybe it is as a reaction against this kind of mixing that i have been kinda obsessed with very old recordings that are transferred to digital without the usual "cleaning up" of the sound: recordings that (intentionally or not) use surface noise as compositional elements (any repeatable feature of a recording is a compositional element--cage was right about repeatability, but he didnt really understand recordings): sound that is less present--rather the inverse in that the sound seems quite far away and is received distorted--and the distortions are a significant element of the experience of listening itself.

i also dont understand the appeal of standard piano tunings, straight chord voicings nor of mechanical 4/4. all this may explain why the music i am involved with has no danger of ever becoming popular. but if that is the case, then it follows that there is no reason to use an engineer whose aesthetic doesnt interest me. and there is no reason to use this type of sound. so we dont.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite