DISSERTATION ON  SOUND

What is  “Sound” ? In order to answer partially to this simple question, I have employed many years of my life, and although I was able to give some answers, the greater certainty that I have acquired, it is that it is so vague  not to allow nobody of being able to know the Sound  thoroughly.

Jakob Ludwig, second  cello  at  Teatro alla Scala
 
Before speaking  about bows, I believe it  is right to spend a couple words on some basic  concepts of the sound, and  its perception. In these years, both  for passion and  job,  I have had to examine  sound thoroughly  in many of its sides , and I realized that this word is interpreted by all the categories that get in touch with it in  various way, and that to  all them sometimes something lacks, as a missing  a sky part.

The first crash with the sound occurred to me, as  many of us, trying to pull out from my double bass notes that could be listened.
I faced the problem from an instrument player point of view   and I knew what my ears wanted to hear,  I knew my sound. After some years I  met the other great passion of my life: bowmaking.I entered  M° Lucchi staff.   In  M° Lucchi's workshop , as we all know devoted to the research much more than any other one, I  had a chance to  learn new  sound concepts,  that made clear to me why I always like my bow so much.  For   double bassists like us  ,   the choice of a bow  is for sure much simpler if compared with that one of  other players, we have  big strings,  so, we immediately recognize if a bow is made with good material:   we succeed in letting  some notes be understood ! For violinists, violists, or  cellists is not that  simple. The strings  are finer, and even a poor bow  can let them  vibrate, therefore it is easier to fall in a misunderstanding.

At  this point I believed I  had  a  quite wide vision of the  problem, nevertheless I just did not succeed in talking with some musicians.
To understand the reasons of these misunderstandings, I had to get in touch with another sound  reality. A couple of years ago, I took a break from the bowmaking world and, changing my environment completely, I cooperated with  the development of a software devoted to the processing of the audio signal in the digital domain.  This software, developed by the Tangerine Tech Engineering, by the CNR labs, is nothing but a parametric equalizer, a device with a lot of  levers  like those on the stereo sets in the ’80es, just to give you an idea, but of course much more powerful and stylish, installed on a Mac.

My cooperation in this field has widened my views a lot. You have to know that the birth of this SW, as all equalizer, is mainly due to the need of smooth or emphasize some frequencies instead of other ones, thus provoking some unbalances  especially in the stereo set but not only, due to furniture, the positioning of the diffusers or the size and proportion  of the listening room.  With this SW it  is possible  to reset frequencies at the right place without loosing the sound quality. Of course, such a peculiar device is devoted to people listening music as a passion, this particular kind of person is the “audiophile”

Before launching this device on  the market, it has had a long gestation time, during this period we drove throughout Italy, as we needed to understand the potentiality  of the product testing it properly.  This long wandering was useful to understand how to use this device in the best way possible. In all the sets that we “adjusted” we were more than satisfied about the results, the frequency response was properly treated and the sound improvement was   evident.
The owners of the set even agreeing about the clear improvements, didn't seem so excited  about the results as we were. The reasons of such dissatisfaction has to be researched in two different, well distinguished origins, one is psycho-acoustic, the other one merely technical.     The technical explanation is that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce digitally, some frequencies as those we find in nature such as the  very high ones of a violin. The calculation  processors were not yet so powerful and the harmonic distortion provoked by the low codification made these frequencies unpleasant, so they were adjusted during the record masterization. With our system we managed to put those frequencies at their right place, but the audiophile we had in front of us, that contrary to one may think he is not a music lover  but a sets fan,  so probably he never listened  to a live concert in his life and didn’t recognize the sound as real, that’s only because the violin played like a violin and a viola as viola !
Finally, when we almost had lost our hopes, we met the right audiophile that after having listened to our system literally screamed of joy and he is one that, not by chance, surely knows the sound of natural instruments pretty well.   His name is Jakob Ludwig, second cellist at the Teatro alla Scala, and after owing the most fine ear I ever met, he is also a sensible  audio planner, so Eng.  Bianchi and I are  proud to  work with him.

Jakob has a very good ear and above all an even  better observation spirit and a sharp logic deduction, but it is not the  same for all musicians. Often a good ear is not joined by a good logic and even if one knows the natural sound of an instrument, he can make mistakes. But this will be described in a next blog. 

The second reason why our system was not so convincing is merely of psycho-acoustic nature. When an audiophile comes back home at night, he takes his shoes off, reduces lights, switches the stereo on  and starts playing one of his favorite  records. He just want to listen to his stereo set, its sound and even if we  improved it, at the same time we completely changed it so he doesn’t recognize it anymore and therefore he doesn’t like it at the first listening. His set had some defaults but with our device it was as listening music at someone’s else.    

We have learned how to adjust slight defaults in stereo sets, instead of solving them and the users seem to appreciate it. All in all,  it is just a hobby for them, they don’t care if the stereo set is not a perfect one, they like it that way and if it plays in  a bad way, they can afford to pay the rent, anyhow it is not a job for them.
Also the musicians are influenced by their psycho-acoustic sensations, when they put the bow on the string they want to listen to their sound, feeling comfortably at home. The only difference is that they pay their  rent with music and  trying to understand  may be very important for them. We will speak about this in a next blog as well.          

All this long speech, not specifically tied to the bows, is about my travel throughout sound and in this way I gave you an idea how this topic can be wide. Often, I see that especially musicians show lightness in their way to compare with the sound  reality.    

This speech is come at an end but the topic sound not at all.  

So long

Paolo