All You Need Is Ears

WE ONCE went on holiday to Portugal, where we rented a villa that was straight out of House and Garden. Absolutely beautiful. It was built in concrete, with lovely curving walls and all the rest of it. Most dramatic of all was the dining-room. It was about sixteen feet across, and was built in a circle - like a drum, but in more ways than one. The floor was tiled, the walls were painted white, the ceiling was hard, and there were no curtains or soft coverings of any kind.

To eat in that room was sheer agony. Every word reverberated and met in the middle, where the table stood. The slightest clatter of a knife and fork immediately destroyed all the consonants of the people talking to you, and you couldn’t make out a thing they were saying. From an acoustic point of view it was the worst possible design that could have been dreamed up, but it wasn’t unique. I am continually amazed at how architects still put up buildings without any thought about the acoustics, which, after all, are just as important a factor as pretty wallpaper in making a place habitable.

Nor are the architects alone. Many people in the recording industry, many would-be producers, have little idea about the principles which govern the commodity in which they are dealing, namely sound. So this chapter is devoted to a discussion of some of those basic principles, most of which are founded on common sense.

What is sound? It is the transmission of pressure waves. The human being receives those waves through his ears, organs specially adapted to interpreting them. The waves are comparatively low-frequency, compared with the electromagnetic waves of radio and light, and unlike them cannot travel through a void. Sound waves require a medium, whether it be air, water, metal or whatever.

The human ear can respond to sound waves ranging from roughly twenty hertz (that is, vibrations per second) up to about 20,000 hertz if the hearer is young and very fit. A dog can go up to 25,000 or 30,000 hertz, which is why you can call a dog on a high-pitched whistle whose sound the human ear can’t detect. The pitch of a note in music is determined by the number of times per second that the instrument is vibrating. For example, a tuning fork vibrating 440 times a second will give you a note equivalent to middle A on the piano. What’s more, all the notes we use have a sympathetic relationship with one another, which is why our music is so gloriously mathematical. The A one octave above middle A will vibrate at 880 hertz or cycles per second, and the A below it at 220.

Of course, those notes that we select for musical use are not the only ones. Any one cycle can be broken down into fractions, so that there are in theory an infinite number of notes. But for convenience we use only a few of them, and our normal scale divides the octave - that is, the range between any one note and the note that is exactly twice, or exactly half, its frequency - into twelve equal divisions. On a piano, those are the seven white keys and the five black keys.

Curiously, that division of the octave into twelve equal semitones is not a natural division, because the difference between the notes is not an equal one in real terms, but a percentage difference. In other words, the relationship of A to A sharp should be the same as the relationship ol A sharp to B, of B to C and so on.

Today’s scale is the way it is because we have made it so. Before Bach’s time, we followed our hearts, and the natural laws of music, and music was comparatively simple. It rarely went outside the natural keys. Violins and key-board instruments were always tuned in a proper harmonic fashion. The limitation to that was that you couldn’t roar outside your nearby keys, because - while the instrument sounded right in a particular key - the moment you moved away from that into a strange key, it sounded out of tune since the relationship of one note to another had changed

So they dreamed up the idea of making all the semitones equal. That meant altering the natural harmonic sense, but it did have the virtue of enabling musicians to work in all sorts of keys. That was why Bach wrote The Well-tempered Klavier, which was a series of piano works written specifically to demonstrate how the new system allowed you to play in every key available - twelve minor and twelve major. It was also a demonstration of Bach’s genius.

All this musical knowledge is not just abstruse and irrelevant. It can be absolutely vital in modern recording. For example, a recording machine has to travel at a certain speed in order to work. If that speed varies at all, the pitch of the music changes, according to the natural laws that link the frequency to the note. A record player that has an uneven speed will vary the pitch and produce a nasty ‘wow’, and in the same way the tape in a tape machine has to run very, very steadily.

Today, professional tapes run at either fifteen or thirty inches a second, and there’s only a tiny percentage of tolerance in those speeds if the notes are not to vary noticeably. But sometimes we have deliberately to alter that speed in order to alter the pitch of something we have recorded. On the Sergeant Pepper film I recorded one particular piece of music which caused a hit of a problem. When I listened to it, I realised the key was a bit unsuitable for the singer, and in addition the music sounded a bit slow. So I wanted to speed it up. But I’ve got a bit of a thing about keys. I hate music that is ‘in the cracks’ - in other words, not in any particular key. So I said: ‘O.K., if we’re going to speed it up, we’ll speed it up by an exact semitone.’

Now fortunately we had in the studio a device that gave us a digital read-out of the speed of the tape machine. We had been running at thirty inches a second, so the tape operator asked me, ‘If you want a semitone up, what speed do I play the machine in order to get that?’

Whipping out my little pocket calculator I was able to tell him to increase the speed from thirty inches a second to 31.78, which was an increase of 5.9463%. That was the speed at which to play the machine in order to be precisely, statistically and logically, a semitone up, without even listening to it. In some astonishment he asked: ‘How on earth did you work that out?’ The answer was that anyone can do it, because the percentage increase in each semitone is the same. It’s like compound interest at the bank: 6% on £100 gives you £106. But 6% on that gives you something more than £112.

It’s all part of the basic laws of harmonics. For instance, each scale on the piano has what we call a ‘dominant’. In the scale of C, it’s G that is the dominant. In lay terms, it’s the chord that is preparatory for the final tonic chord or, put simpler still, it’s the note, having sung which, there is only one final note you can follow with. In any scale, that dominant is one and a half times the frequency of the bottom note. The dominant in the scale of A is E.

So, as middle A is 440 hertz, the E above it must be 660. And these musical truths are linked to straightforward mechanical laws. (But, in the even-tempered scale, that E is 659.25 hertz.)

This is what happens. Take a violin or guitar string, and pluck it, and it will utter a certain note. Now put your finger halfway along it; instead of vibrating like a bowstring it will vibrate on either side of your finger. In fact, if you touch it very lightly, it will vibrate in the form of an S -the bottom bit will he going out as the top bit is going in. The note you hear will be precisely an octave above the note you heard the first time.

If you now put your finger a third of the way up the string, and pluck it, the vibration will be snake-like, and you will hear three times the original note. It will vibrate three times faster simply because it is three times shorter. So, if the original note was, say, the A below middle A, which is 220 hertz, then the second note would be 440, which is middle A, and the third would be 660. That note, you will find, is the dominant, in this case the E that I was talking about before: and that relationship works for any note you choose. It’s a matter of natural harmonics.

Everything has its own resonant frequency. For example, if you take a reed, such as you use in an oboe, it will vibrate in its own unique way. And the logical, mathematical laws that apply to the lengths of strings also apply to all instruments. A wind instrument is -just a length of tubing. You have a mouthpiece at one end in order to make it resonate, and the longer the horn, the lower the note. That’s why an organ pipe has to be sixty-four feet long in order to produce the bottom octave. There’s no way of getting round it. Similarly, that’s why a contra-bassoon has such a lot of tubing. The tubes go up, down and all round, and it’s twice the length of an ordinary bassoon, as it has to be in order to reach the bottom range. Again, the French horn, if you unravelled all its tubing like spaghetti and stretched it out, would be about sixteen feet long. That would obviously be much too difficult to handle, which is why they wrap it up the way it is, Trumpets, too, are curled round, and are really quite long. The exception is the piccolo trumpet, which I used on the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’ recording. It plays an octave above an ordinary trumpet, and is therefore half the length, almost like a toy trumpet - about ten inches long. In all these cases, it is the length of the horn which determines the frequencies the instrument will give.

But now comes the question of whether those frequencies will be tuneful or not. What is ‘being tuneful’? Since all sounds are vibrations, you can draw a picture of them expressed in terms of waves, and tuneful sounds are those which are fairly regular in their frequencies. Noises are irregular sounds. But the perfect wave, which is absolutely regular, is boring. That’s why pure synthesiser sound is the most boring in the world. It’s a pure note, always in tune, and completely harmonious. My feelings about that may have a lot to do with the fact that I’m not a great stickler for being in tune. I think that people who are tend sometimes to overdo it. It may sound an Irishism, but I think that being out of tune, provided it’s tuneful, is in itself an attraction.

Unlike the synthesiser, no human voice is ever perfectly in tune. No one ever sings an exact note that is completely the right frequency for as long as it lasts. The voice bends on either side of the correct frequency, and that’s what is called ‘vibrato’. Some singers have a very wide vibrato, so that, if they’re trying to sing middle A, instead of hitting a pure 440 hertz they will fluctuate between about 430 and 450, occasionally hitting 440, They are going through it, straddling it, firing their guns on both sides of the target but rarely hitting it. To me, a really wide vibrato is extremely offensive to hear; but a good vibrato, which doesn’t veer off the proper frequency too much, is fine. Besides, as I said, it’s not possible to sing without some vibrato. Humans are not mathematically accurate beings we can never draw an exactly straight line.

Nor is the vibrato always equally balanced on either side of the note. Some people in straddling the note favour one emphasis or the other, a little above, or a little below. That means they always sing slightly sharp or slightly flat, and it’s that slight variation which determines whether a person is singing in tune or not.

I believe that it all depends upon the kind of voice a person has. I’ve known singers whose voices will still sound good, no matter how out of tune they are. Equally, there are people, myself included, who sound awful no matter how much in tune they sing.

Mind you, I’ve had artists who are great sticklers for being in tune. I record them, and then say: ‘That’s great. Come in and listen to it.’ They come to the control room and listen, and then look at me in amazement and say: ‘But I’m not singing that in tune.’ Perhaps it doesn’t square with what they expect from my reputation -1 don’t know; but I tell them, ‘Well, I know it’s a little bit under the note, but it sounds good. If you want to sing it a little more on the note, it won’t make any difference to me; but F quite like it as it is.’ Then they become astounded, and worry that I’m not being too particular about being dead in tune. But I don’t think it’s that important. What matters is whether the sound is offensive or good. After all, in jazz there are many notes, blue notes, which sound great simply because they are out of tune. So ‘being in tune’ is a matter of degree, and a matter of taste.

Today, in recording, it’s possible to alter the pitch of a person’s voice in relation to the backing. This can be done with an instrument called an Eventide Harmoniser, with which you can jack the recording up or down to make the singer sing at a different pitch all the way through. Of course, if he varies his pitch, so that one note is in tune and the next is not, you have a problem! But if, for example, he sings consistently flat, you can make him more in tune, a technique unheard of in the earlier days of recording.

The fact remains, however, that being in tune is not a scientific achievement, but a human one. Every instrument has a degree of tuning which depends upon the human ear - even the oboe, the instrument to which the rest of the orchestra tunes itself. It depends on the quality of the reed which the player puts into the instrument, and the length of the reed in the instrument itself. After that, the player’s intonation will vary, but it’s his ear which tells him whether he’s playing in tune or not. Stringed instruments, of course, have to be tuned before a concert, and that, too, depends on the players’ ears. The worst of all is the harp, because every string has to be tuned individually before it can be played, which is why the harp player comes in about an hour before a performance to tune up.

The only time the orchestra doesn’t tune to the oboe is when there is a piano. Then it generally tunes to that, because tuning it is obviously even more of a chore than tuning the harp. Sometimes the string players will come in to me and say: ‘That piano sounds sharp.’ But they still have to tune to it. Quite often, too, the piano-tuners sharpen the notes a little as they go up the octaves, sacrificing absolute accuracy in order to make the piano sound ‘brilliant’ on the top.

What all this emphasises is that the important thing is for instruments, whether individually or as a whole orchestra, to be in tune with themselves. For example, it doesn’t matter if middle A, which should ideally be tuned at 440, is actually tuned at 443. It will just be slightly sharper, but that’s all right as long as everything else fits (in other words, the A above it must now be 886). A note is neither good nor bad in itself. What matters is the relationship between one note and another, which determines our harmonic sense.

But then another factor comes into play: the conditions in which you are hearing the sound. When someone talks to you, his voice is coming through the air (unless you’re having an underwater conversation!) and being picked up by two receivers, your ears one on each side; the fact that you can move your head around to balance the two inputs gives you a directional sense, rather like a range-finder. But in normal conditions you don’t only hear the voice coming directly at you. It is also reflected off the walls, the windows, and the table or whatever other hard objects are in the room. If the room had no reflective surfaces, the voice would sound very different. Indeed, if you were ten thousand feet up, in still air, and the speaker turned his head away, you wouldn’t hear the voice at all.

In fact, for sound-measuring tests, they have built what are called anechoic chambers, in which all the reflective surfaces have been eliminated, and the walls and ceiling covered in absorptive material. The only sound you can hear is the direct sound from one source to a receiver. I have been in one, and it’s most uncanny. It would quickly drive you mad. Nothing is more terrifying than a totally silent room.

Without reflective surfaces, the voice is very directional, particularly in the higher frequencies. It’s the same with a hi-fi player. Most loudspeakers have inside them a second, small loudspeaker called a ‘tweeter’, which responds to the high frequencies. If you move away from the direct beam of that tweeter, the torchlight beam, as it were, you won’t hear, for instance, the real crispness of a cymbal. Bass sounds, on the other hand, are very diffuse, and come from all directions.

What this all adds up to is that the sound you hear will vary considerably according to the quality of the surfaces in the room you are listening in. Imagine sound being like a ray of light. Then imagine being in a room whose walls were covered with mirrors, and switching on a searchlight. It would dazzle you. In exactly the same way, the ear is dazzled by too many reflections. This ‘reverberation’ is what children delight in when they go into a tunnel, or under the arch of a bridge, and shout. The voice bounces back and forth around the hard surfaces until it gradually loses impetus and dies. The difference between that and echo is that echo is a repeat of a voice or sound, whereas reverberation is a continuation of that sound by means of its energy rebounding and rebounding.

In a studio, you’re going to get unfortunate results if those reflections keep coming back in the same way. You get a nasty build-up of frequencies which changes the characteristic of the sound, making it messy, diffuse and very difficult to record. The ideal way of building reflective surfaces for acoustic purposes in recording is to make them refract the sound. You make the sound waves bounce off in a new direction rather than return the way they came. The ideal studio, therefore, is one in which the walls are never parallel. It’s also preferable for them never to be straight. With continuous convex surfaces, the sound will hit one part of the surface and return in a particular way, but if it hits another part of the surface it will take an entirely new direction.

The other way to get round the build-up of sound is to have walls which absorb it rather than reflect it at all. You can have curtains and carpets, which kill off some of the high frequencies, and bass absorbers which take care of the heavy, low frequencies. For some of today’s heavy rock groups you really need studios where the walls will absorb some of the aural energy. For instance, in our number two studio at AIR we have around the walls a number of boxes, all of different shapes and dimensions; each has a little lead weight, fitted in the centre of the front of the box. The boxes are tuned so that their fronts vibrate in sympathy with the bass frequencies, absorbing the impact. It’s rather like a boxer taking a punch. They don’t resonate and make any noise themselves, but they do move, and in doing so absorb the sound. There are other ways of achieving this, too. In America, they have what are called ‘bass traps’ - chimney-like affairs filled with hanging absorbent material, which again is tuned to absorb the bass frequencies.

The trouble is, the ideal studio doesn’t exist, because different kinds of sound require different reverberation periods. Voices, for example, need a certain amount of natural reverberation, and in recording you usually add artificially what is known as ‘echo’, although it isn’t really echo at all. Then again, a string ensemble needs a longer reverberation period than a rhythm section, which normally needs a very short period. We refer to this as the difference between a ‘live* sound and a dead sound.

A very large studio, like Number One at Abbey Road, which had a very long reverberation period of about two and half seconds, was great for recording an orchestra. It gave a beautiful sound to the strings. But put a rhythm section in there, and not only would you muck up the sound of the rhythm section itself, but also the sound of it would make its way on to the violin microphones, where you could never get rid of it. If you have too much reverberation on drums, they swim all over the place and become very muddy. In a live recording studio, all the Bounds merge, and you can’t discern one from the other.

To counteract this, people have built studios whose walls absorb all the sound. But they are uncomfortable to play in. The reason why people like singing in the bath, and reckon that they are the next thing to Gigli while so doing, is that their voices come back at them nicely off the reflective surfaces. In the same way, a violin player likes to hear himself coming back off the walls, and also to hear what the other players are doing. He likes to be able to hear that he is playing in tune with the rest, so that they are a team. In a studio where all the sounds are being absorbed he won’t be able to hear himself or his friends, to that he might as well be playing alone among eighty other people who just happen to be there. That is not an orchestra.

So a studio has to be a compromise. At AIR, we generally have a hard floor and a fairly reflective ceiling at the string end of the studios. We keep one end of the studio live, and the other, where I normally put the rhythm section, dead. The studios which we have built in Montserrat aren’t really for strings, but for the kind of instruments a rock group uses. On the other hand, although these tend to be electric, there are still many acoustic instruments used, such as guitars, piano and drums. Therefore, since I like a moderately live drum sound as long as it doesn’t affect the other instruments, we will still keep a live end in the studio.

This awareness of acoustics is by no means something rarefied or only for the record producer. If only more people would listen to what rooms are doing to sounds, and therefore be aware that they are not hearing them properly, I’m certain that the pressure would make architects pay more attention to acoustics in the design of houses, restaurants, cinemas and auditoriums. In fact, if people were generally more aware of the quality of sound, they might make designers of television sets take more trouble with their sound - which is, frankly, abysmal. After all, I think even the men who built our old cathedrals benefited from their own experience. I don’t think they knew anything about the technicalities of it, but having built one that sounded good they probably said: ‘That sounds fine. Let’s build another one like it.’

Cathedrals, of course, have enormous reverberation times, sometimes as long as four or five seconds. That’s because of the huge volume of air and the distance between surfaces - most of which, stonework and glass, are highly reflective. Of course, that would be hopeless for a pop group, but it’s marvellous for choral work. The reason is that it has the effect of sustaining the voice and its overtones. If you have a choir with a lot of voices, everyone won’t be singing at the same frequency. If they did, it would sound like one voice. It’s the same with a violin section. Twenty violins are not playing exactly the same, either in intonation or vibrato. Each is varying his vibrato slightly, both in pitch and duration, and the little frequencies beat against each other to produce a nice liquid sound. Likewise, the members of a choir will be singing slightly different intonations all the way through, and even the few bum notes will become merged and smoothed out. That’s part of the delight of a good choir.

Of course, in a place like a cathedral you do get a multiplication of sounds, because of the long reverberation period, and if you were singing a very fast, bitty piece which required a great deal of articulation, like some of the Gilbert and Sullivan songs, it would sound awful. But for something like Gregorian chant it’s marvellous, because it’s a gradual diminution of sound. The walls nearest you reflect the sound first, and are louder; those from the far surfaces are weaker. The result is a progressive decay of sound.

The reverse happens if, at home, you take your hi-fi into a small room with a lot of resonant material, without much in the way of curtains, carpets or upholstery. You won’t have any breathing space between the original sound and the kick-back off the walls, and the effect is going to be very unpleasant. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller the room, the deader it should be.

So next time you listen to a record, think about that. Think about the way you’re listening, and think what you’re listening to - not just the original sound, but what it’s doing within the room. Not just the original sound on the record itself, either, but what has been added to it by means of studio acoustics and artificial reverberation. That way you will start to understand sound.

The real hi-fi buff, of course, does know a lot about acoustics. He will study recordings in great depth, far more than I do - but then, I am not a hi-fi buff. He will have special speakers in his living-room, and make every-thing subservient to that. He’ll put the chairs in special positions and he’ll make sure the carpet is the right size and depth and so on. I’m sure his wife has a terrible time. You’ll go into his room one evening, and he’ll play you a record and say: ‘Listen to that triangle. Isn’t it fantastic?’ Well, it will be fantastic, but as far as I’m concerned, life’s too short for all that. If he is concentrating too much on listening for the triangle, he may be missing out on the piece of music as a whole. The technical may take over from the artistic.

On the other hand, if people get their kicks that way, it’s fine by me, and as a producer I have to cater for them. It’s easy to sneer at them, but in a way they are our pioneers. We have to think of them when we’re making records, and thank goodness we do, because without them we would still have rotten sound. Pick up a copy of The Gramophone and look at the reviews of the latest recordings. Today, standards generally have become so high that if the critic is to differentiate between one record and another he must go into these technical factors. He may have been listening to two different performances of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, and he’ll write some-thing like: ‘This one has a lovely gradation of tone from the pianist. .The orchestra is finely balanced, and I love the conductor’s reading because he takes the tempo exactly right. However, the recording is muddy.’ Or he might write: ‘The sound quality was superb. The living presence came over on this recording. You could hear the third flute player coughing in the pause.’

That leads to the whole question of what you are aiming to produce when you make a record. The trouble is that there have always been so many floating standards in music. When I started in the business, certainly in the making of classical records, the aim was to recreate on record the exact sound that you would get in a good auditorium, listening to a live performance. But then you have to ask who is listening? And in which concert hall? There is no standard, although in the early days we went to tremendous lengths in search of whatever standard it was, even to the extent of using just one microphone and arranging the players around it in such a way that it was completely natural.

That leads to another problem. In real life, we have two ears, not one; so you really ought to have two microphones. Try listening to something with just one ear, and you’ll hear what an enormous difference it makes. That’s the effect of having only one mike. When people go into a studio for the first time, they tend to put their head down and listen to what the mike’s listening to. They forget that they have two ears, whereas the mike only has one. So when I want to listen to what a mike’s doing, I shut off one ear, and that gives me much more accurate information.

Since the early days attitudes have changed. Now we tend to say: ‘The standard in the concert hall is one thing, but there’s no final arbiter of what makes good sound. We have to make up our own minds about it.’ In pop music, certainly, the sky’s the limit, which is the great thing about it. We have an infinite palette of musical colours. We don’t have to say: ‘This has got to sound like a section of violins in the studio,’ or, ‘We have to hear the fifth French horn from the back clearly.’ We’re dealing with abstract sounds. We can do exactly as we want in trying to achieve the most pleasant effect. A lot of the sounds on records like Sergeant Pepper are made by legitimate instruments, but the use of them doesn’t necessarily correspond to what you would hear in a concert hall. You can create your own sounds, and do it more effectively than if you were performing live.

When I say that, one argument that is frequently levelled at me is: ‘You’re not being very honest.’ I say, to hell with that. We have a different art form here, and I don’t feel in any way inhibited. It’s like criticising a film maker for making a film based on a book, which the critics do not feel is sufficiently true to the original. But then, he’s not writing a book, he’s making a film. In the same way, the recording of a concert performance at the Albert Hall may be the same as a recording of a live stage play, but making a record in a studio is much more like making a film.

After all, if Roger Moore plunges through a plate-glass window in a James Bond film, you don’t believe that it really is plate-glass. You see him just before he does it, and you hear the breaking of glass, and you see him immediately afterwards, and clever cutting gives you the illusion that he has done it. But you know in your heart of hearts that he hasn’t. In the same way, it shouldn’t be expected that people are necessarily doing what they appear to be doing on records,

That’s not to say that I think we can replace the genius of the great performer. The human quality is something for which we should always strive, and I would be very sad if we ever lost it. But technically, we can help.

There was a famous case when I was still at EMI, in which the celebrated soprano Kirsten Flagstad was making a recording. When the day came for her to sing her top C, she was below par and just couldn’t make it. So they brought in Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to dub in the high C for her, since they were pressed for time and the rest of the performance was magnificent. Schwarzkopf was duly paid, and was asked to keep quiet about the incident. Unfortunately the story leaked out and was reported in the papers, causing a minor scandal and fury at EMI. But I never really understood the fuss. Everyone has his off days, and if you’re going to make a great record, why not dub in the one note? After all, it wasn’t as if it was something the main singer couldn’t do at all. On any other day she could have done it perfectly well.

People have ideas about what is ethical in recording and what is not, which they don’t really think out properly. For example, there was even one time when I asked Paul McCartney to dub in a note on a record, and he said he didn’t want to because he thought it was cheating. I told him: ‘We’ve all been cheating all the time.’ And he did it.

Again, some people expect to go to a live performance and hear what they heard on the record. Why should they? Those are two separate things. For that reason the Beatles never gave live performances of songs like ‘Strawberry Fields’. But nowadays, there are other ways of doing it. ‘Live and Let Die’, for example, had a complicated score which I had written for a large orchestra. When I saw Paul McCartney and Wings perform it in Los Angeles in 1977, I was enormously impressed by the way he put it over. To back up the music he had a fantastic laser light show, explosions and so on, and the whole performance kept you enthralled. It didn’t sound anything like the record, but you thought it did because you were seeing the whole performance as well as hearing it. There was no cheating about that.

On the other hand, there are some things I would describe as cheating. There was a big fuss about a group who had a number-one record, although none of them had played on it. It was a totally manufactured product, and that was undoubtedly cheating. It’s perfectly possible to get a lot of session musicians into a studio, make a record, and call them Fred Nerks and his Oojahs. Then, if the record does well, everyone wants to see Fred N, only there isn’t any Fred N. So you get a group to pretend to be Fred N and the Os, and you put them on at the Palladium and get them to reproduce as accurately as possible what you’ve done in the studios. But that’s commercial deception, and I don’t hold with it at all.

I believe that a certain amount of artifice is necessary in making a record, but by that I mean help, not deception. After all, nobody tries to hide the fact that a lot of rock groups have string synthesisers as a regular part of their make-up.

I have never liked the sound myself, though, because I find it artificial. Another argument against synthesisers is that while all sorts of computerised sounds are fine for a single note, they are no good when you want a bank of sound. You need individual effort, the cancelling out of one person’s vibrato by another, and the dynamics that only a human performance can give. To create that artificially is a long and tedious process - and in any case, why deny the work to the people who are capable of doing it for real? You could argue for synthesisers on the grounds of absolute accuracy, but then, as I’ve said, I’m not a stickler for accuracy. If that was the be-all and end-all, we might as well give up and let computers do all the work. I happen to like a little bit of inaccuracy, a little bit of humanity. Even on a classical record I’d rather have a slight blur on one note, provided it’s a great performance, than have a rendition that was perfect but soulless. I’d always prefer a great classical pianist with a few imperfections to Walter Carlos giving a perfect performance on his synthesiser. Perfect beauty, whether in a woman or anything “else, tends to be a bore, and I think that holds true for music.

Another of the things we can do to help the artist in recording is to play around with the frequencies. Within the audible frequency range, different frequencies have different effects. For example, if you’re on holiday, it may be that you hear from your bedroom a disco booming away in the basement, and you simply can’t escape the thumping of the bass guitar and bass drum. Because those are the most diffuse frequencies, they will go through anything, whereas the high frequencies are much more directional. Now, everyone who has a record-player knows about boosting bass, or treble, or middle, and of course we can also do that in recording. The question is what the effect will be. One example would be if you were to boost around 3000 hertz. That would emphasise all the sibilants and the clear-speech characteristics in the human voice. Equally, if you were to cut off everything above about 3000 hertz, you would be losing all the clarity of speech.

That is what takes place when people start to go deaf. They don’t suddenly lose volume across the whole range; they start by losing the top frequencies. That starts to happen to most people comparatively early in life. Something not generally known is that women have a wider frequency range than men - though not as good as dogs! An eighteen-year-old girl will probably hear between 20 and 20,000 hertz, whereas a fifty-year-old man, depending on his physical state, will probably hear from 100 to 8,000 and nothing on either side of that range. Anyone can test his or her range by listening to a record with test tones on it. I, for example, can’t hear 15,000 hertz any more, though I could once. You might think that could be very damaging to someone like a record producer. But the brain makes allowances for it: the sense of values remains the same. In fact the curious thing is that, if anything, the perception of differences in volume is sharpened.

However, I should end with a note of warning. Everyone suffers a progressive loss of hearing with age, but that can be greatly accelerated by damage to the ears- And with today’s rock bands bashing out sounds at very high levels in discos and so on, it’s all too easy to suffer that damage. If you listen to music at these high levels, there will be a limited amount of time before deterioration sets in, and that deterioration is irreparable, because it is the nerve-endings of the ears which are affected.

That is very much a function of how long you listen to loud sounds. For example, you can listen to 130 decibels, which is the threshold of pain, for a second, and it won’t harm you. Listen to it for ten seconds, and it will. You can listen to 120 decibels, which is still very noisy indeed, for half an hour without damage, but an hour would be too long. And so on down the scale of loudness.

The danger in recording, and for people playing in or listening to rock groups, is that the ear acts as its own limiter. After a period of heavy noise, everything gradually becomes normal to you and it’s only too easy to step up the volume to impress yourself a bit more, Then, after a while at that level, you step it up again, without realising the damage you’re doing to your ears. There have been occasions when, if I had suddenly gone into the studios at five in the morning, instead of having worked there all night, I would have been astonished at the levels I had been putting into my ears. But of course they had been increased gradually since nine the previous night. That is something the producer must guard against.

And don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ve got away with it, because the worst factor in ear damage is that it is not immediate. If you harm your ears by listening to a very high level for too long, you’ll just feel out of sorts for a day or two. You might hear some ringing, or feel a bit deaf, but you’ll soon feel all right again. What you won’t realise is that in four or five years’ time your hearing will start to go, and that can be traced back and attributed directly to the earlier traumatic shock. The nerve endings wither, and although it takes a long time for them finally to decay, there’s no going back once they have done so.

This applies to everyone, of course, not only musicians, engineers and producers. I know that people are becoming more aware of environmental pollution by noise, but they think in terms of things like Concorde flying overhead, which is nonsense. That won’t affect your ears at all. You are much more at risk with the record-player turned up too loud atjiome, or in a disco.

To get the best enjoyment out of sound, all you need is ears. Make sure they stay in good shape.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 836