pwhodges

I recall a performance of the Rossini Petite Messe in Oxford Town Hall around 1980 in which Simon Preston played the harmonium. Near the end of the big solo, there are a couple of places where it dies away, followed by a sequence of loud chords. The memory of SP grinning broadly as he rocked from side to side pumping up for these chords still makes me smile - there were perceptible giggles in the audience, too. Paul

Oh dear! I'm picturing a "Florence Foster Jenkins" stop now... Paul

Geoffrey Webber in Early Music (reviewing the revised version of Beckmann's edition) finds both merit and problems with both Beckmann and Albrecht, and concludes (in 1998) that there is still no really satisfactory edition available. In part he seems to prefer the decisions in Beckmann's earlier edition, where he has changed them - and comments that the main problem with that edition (which is what I have) was that the critical commentary was separate and hard to come by. Paul

Buxtehude: Beckmann does fine for me. Hindemith: Slides before the beat, surely; but the inverted mordent on the penultimate chord on the beat. Paul

Scroll down more. Paul

This is consistent with my recent remarks about unnatural recording techniques increasing listening fatigue. Paul

I'm intrigued, as I've been pointed at references showing that detection of lateral direction with one ear has an accuracy of about +/- 5 degrees, rather than the +/- 1 or 2 degrees possible with two ears - but this was tested by blocking one ear, which may still be able to hear a little by bone conduction. None the less, I am surprised that you have no directional hearing at all. When I said surround, I meant that the recording had to be a "real" surround recording (i.e. ambisonic). Most published 5.1 stuff is actually stereo with unrelated mushy ambience played from the "rear" (i.e. side) speakers, and so would generate no useful directional cues, and those that do use a setup with five microphones on some sort of rig are using them in a way that violates the requirements for generating good directional cues (the positioning of the 5 speakers guarantees that in any case!). Really the only fairly easily available test would be one of the Nimbus DVD-A disks, played, as suggested, with the main speakers in a square (centre front is not used) and the listener central; if you go as far as trying, the disk of A Midsummer Night's Dream might be good, as the actors roam all round the microphone. But if you have no directional hearing at all in real life, a recording isn't going to manage any better, however it is made. Paul

I am not aware of any work that has been done to investigate the directional hearing of those with hearing in only one ear. Although it would be limited, there are some known mechanisms, especially those related to reflections in the pinna and those using head movement, that are still available; and indeed, for people with both ears working these are already the main ways of detecting height in the first instance, and even horizontal direction at the highest frequencies (above about 4kHz). But of course I don't know if your loss is from childhood or later in life; if the second, your brain may not have been able to develop the available mechanisms sufficiently to be useful, as could have happened in childhood. However, even if you do have some ability to detect sound direction, the compromises that make stereo work as well as it does for most people would not work well for you; but I suspect in that case that a properly developed surround system might surprise you. Paul

The earlier Bate Messiaen disks are ambisonic recordings, but the later ones are not. The technology died in the marketplace along with "quad", and most engineers just shrugged and dropped it. Nimbus, however, kept the faith, and all their recordings are (planar) ambisonic, even though it is impossible to buy the necessary surround decoder (except from Meridian, at a price!) - but they have recently released some as four-channel DVD-As for playing on surround systems. There were also some ambisonic disks from Collins. The patents for ambisonics and the soundfield microphone have expired, and it is now possible to buy a relatively cheap microphone for ambisonics (TetraMic). Encoding to the 2-channel matrix form is easy in software (see here), but a small but enthusiastic community is working towards an agreed file format for distribution, and decoding plugins for common computer players. As well as its use for straight recording, ambisonics is also a natural technolgy for synthesising enveloping soundfields, and so has gained a foothold in the sound projection and computer gaming businesses. It is also used internally in some companies' sound processing plugins. Paul

OK. Perhaps the way I put it was a bit of late-night hyperbole, but still... What I am saying is not that the technical aspects of recording are in any way inadequate - the noise and distortion levels that can be achieved these days are excellent, and in a properly designed system the microphone is the limiting factor (for recording, that is - let's leave speakers till later). The problem is more philosophical, and is to do with a combination of practicality and lack of vision. The plain fact is that at present we put nearly all our effort into making one-dimensional recordings of what is a fully three-dimensional phenomenon. Unfortunately (he says!) this approach (known as stereo) works far better than it has any right to when analysed from a theoretical and a psychoacoustic viewpoint - "unfortunately" because this has stultified any attempt to investigate real improvements. In addition, the compromises introduced by the development of stereo recording have produced unrealistic expectations in listeners. Recordings are made to sound as recordings are expected to sound, not like the real sound of music. Because in a one-dimensional recording reverberation which would naturally envelop the listener is folded round to appear from the same direction as the instrument(s), it is easy to get too much; this leads (separately) to using studios with less reverberation (and even designing halls to have less, so they become more suitable for recording than listening), and to placing microphones closer to the source. The loss of directional cues in the reverberation makes both venues and instruments less natural. Close microphones lead to the loss of the natural high-frequency fall-off caused by the selective sound absorption of the air, so the sound becomes un-naturally bright. In addition, the exaggerated perspective on an orchestra leads to microphones being placed higher, and to additional microphones suspended above, and these high microphones get more high frequencies, because of the way that many instruments radiate. Even if correction is applied for these factors, the sound is no longer like what a listener would naturally hear, and multiple microphones lead to conflicting psychoacoustic cues, causing listening fatigue. I would prefer to try to reproduce the sound, which means recording and playing back a fully three-dimensional soundfield. Practicalities are a problem, I admit (I don't have a 3-D playback system, though I do record a 3-D signal these days), but the point is to be looking towards this kind of real improvement and using the knowledge gained to optimise the usage of more restricted systems. Currently "Surround Sound" is sold as an answer to this issue, but it really isn't; the conventional 5.1 system is mainly used to present a stereo front signal combined with diffuse artificial reverberation from the sides. Because the speakers are very irregularly spaced, proper reproduction of sound sources all around the listener cannot be achieved through such a system anyway. If the speakers are moved to regular spacing, good results can be managed, but not using the recording techniques commercially used for surround. But it's still only two-dimensional (yes, I know some advertisers talk about "3-D sound" - idiots), and, for instance, the folding of reverberation into a plane is still a problem. I shall try to wind down at this arbitrary point, not because my argument is complete, but for practicality (most of the sentences above could be expanded into separate essays). To read further, start at http://ambisonic.net/ and poke around. You will probably find yourself at my website (incomplete work in progress) at some point, and at another I contribute sample surround recordings to. People who don't accept this viewpoint may call me a purist. I prefer to recall a student experiment in which parallel stereo recordings of the same performance were made using the simplest possible microphone technique (Blumlein) and mixed multimiking. The recordings were played to listeners who knew nothing about recording techniques, and one (guess!) was universally preferred. The important thing, though, was that because the listeners had no conscious awareness of the difference in the sounds produced by the different recording techniques, they said that they preferred the performance in the better recording. Bad recording damages music, and this may be blamed on the performer(s). Paul

...is a myth. But I won't go into it more here, as it's not the place, and you'd not be able to stop me once I get going. Paul

Dull? or Tinny? Ah well; I find the sound quite reasonable. The hiss, however... I have analysed it a little, and it's very precisely white noise. It is also constant in the gaps between the tracks. So I think it is simply dither that's been applied at the wrong level, or at the wrong stage in mastering, perhaps when increasing the level of a rather low recording. It's embarrassing for them, but probably marginal for chucking the recording and starting again - so we have to tolerate it. Paul

And the grand-daddy of them: Personchester. Paul

But only where the word can be seen as neutral. Chairman, for instance, had a phase of providing chairwoman as an alternative, followed by chairperson and just chair. I also understand that fairly recently a female mayor's husband has been officially referred to as the mayoress, to keep things as they always were... Rotherham has a mayor and mayoress who are both female. Paul

The trigger swells of my experience don't have ratchets, so they can only be set open or shut. Paul

To merge this thread with another, I have a recording of E Power Biggs playing the six Trio Sonatas on a pedal harpsichord; it's a bit clunky, really, as harpsichords tended to be in those days. Paul

I prefer the guy with the huge accordion! Mind you, I have a (far better) recording by the New York Trombone Quartet of... Bartók's Fourth String Quartet - that's the one with a whole movement in pizzicato. It's actual quite a reasonable rendition. Paul

My comments on YouTube's publisher status were based on an American commentary on their defence when sued, relating directly to their responsibilities (or not) defined under the American digital rights legislation (can't recall the name this instant). Paul

Until the mixture breaks... Paul

There have been enough strong words on this forum about recording without permission, that you simply cannot be surprised at the reaction to your anouncement in that initial post that you were going to publish such a recording on YouTube without reference to the holders of the copyright in the performance (service or concert - doesn't matter). In fact you have been treated more gently than I expected when I first read it! Paul

The recording, but not the performance within it, of course. I didn't realise this was actually formalised. Not exactly. YouTube do not check incoming clips, because then they would be a publisher, and liable for any clip they missed. By not checking they are managing to keep common-carrier status, with no initial liability (like an ISP), but they will take down material immediately at the request of the copyright holder (though not if someone else simply tells them it shouldn't be there) - there is no "argument" with them as they will simply do what they are told with appropriate authority. And of course you do have an argument with the contributor, being the one who published the material inappropriately. Paul

Not to mention the set in the Brilliant Bach Box (£80 at Blackwells), conducted by Leusink and recorded in under a year (Brilliant were expecting to put Rilling's set in their box, but that fell through at a late stage, and so they had to get a new recording done really fast to catch the anniversary year!). It's actually pretty good overall, and my favourite for some works - certainly it's done Brilliant's reputation a lot of good. Bizzarely, the first movement of BWV 69 is missing, even though the words are in the booklet*. It's not one to a part (except 106), but it's an all-male chorus. There's a home-spun feel to some of it which I dare say was probably present in many of Bach's performances too! Paul * Harnoncourt omitted the movement because he had already recorded it as part of 69a - Leusink presumably followed him without realising why he done it!

Rogg's Hindemith from Zurich in my case. Various Oryx records of old continental organs (now largely a Harmonia Mundi CD box). "The Organ in Sanity and Madness". "An Organ for an Organ Scholar". A little later, Catherine Ennis at Reading Town Hall. Paul (edit) I am reminded by another post to add Downes at the Festival Hall playing Sei Gegrusset and the Widor Toccata; and Heiller playing Bach Concerti - never had music sounded more inevitable.

Exeter College Chapel, Oxford - Hill originally, I think. Paul

This one divides people - I like it a lot, even though as a former chorister there myself I bemoan the loss of the previous Harrison (but not its crudely extended case). Paul