Space within Space: Artificial Reverb and the Detachable Echo

Sterne, Jonathan

doi:10.1162/grey_a_00177

Cited by 28 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The final snare hits at the end of each verse are reverberated, in a way that is obviously artificial, but functional as climaxes. This is an example of Sterne's (2015) concept of 'detachable echo'. The modern trend of treating sounds without reverberation as the standardthat is, sounds without a sense of space or locationmeans that reverberation is a tool for creativity (Sterne 2015: 111-12).…”

Section: 'Floating Away'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Lo-fi Today

Neal

2022

Org. Sound

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This article investigates two current incarnations of ‘lo-fi’ music and questions the extent to which these subgenres are actually low in fidelity. In essence, mainstream ‘hi-fi’ productions use similar effects, such as filtering to sound like a radio or adding noise to sound like a vinyl record. To understand lo-fi today, this article explores music by a lo-fi hip-hop producer and a lo-fi ambient producer, drawing upon the analytical methods of Alan Moore and Dennis Smalley. First to be discussed is Glimlip, one of the many anonymous producers behind the popular Lofi Girl YouTube streams. The next discussed is Amulets, an ambient musician known for using hacked and looped cassette tapes. Analyses of their music demonstrate a level of care in production that goes against the idea that lo-fi is primitive or naive.

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Section: 'Floating Away'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Lo-fi Today

Neal

2022

Org. Sound

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“…As with many acous�c experiments, the research exists along a spectrum of technological reproduc�on which has been explored in literature on recorded music listening (e.g. Doyle, 2005;Sterne, 2015). Headphones create a listening environment relevant to everyday music listening, and their use is helpful for isola�ng acous�c parameters from their parallels in visual space.…”

Section: Reverbera�on Time and Musical Emo�onmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverberation Time and Musical Emotion in Recorded Music Listening

Wilkie,

Harrison

2024

Preprint

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The influence of acoustic space on musical emotion has to a degree been studied musicologically and empirically. However, there remain large gaps, related to limitations in emotion measures and a narrow range of examined acoustic settings. This study explored the ways in which room acoustic parameters may influence the emotional experience of music listening. A quantitative approach was adopted, whereby musical stimuli in parametrically altered acoustic settings were heard over user headphones. These were compared for domain-specific musical emotions on the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS). The main findings showed that room acoustic features did not have a strong effect on ‘Unease’ or ‘Vitality’ components of the GEMS, but rather influenced aspects of ‘Sublimity’ (i.e., ‘Nostalgia’, ‘Transcendence’, ‘Wonder’). These results suggest that subjective percepts beyond pleasantness or emotional impact are altered by room acoustic space, creating scope for more complex interactions between room acoustics and musical emotion.

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“…Consider the “hook” I mentioned earlier (“ ewooOOH !”). As with other instances of whale music, this sound, sampled from a singing humpback whale, was engineered to sound “natural.” In audio-technical discourse, the terms “dry” and “wet” are used to characterize differences between a sound and its detachable echo (Sterne, 2015). Humpback calls were definitely “wet”; their “echoey” qualities, sometimes sourced in the recording process, sometimes boosted in post-production, key to their ability to suggest an expansive nature.…”

Section: Listening To Whale Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmentalists abide: Listening to whale music – 1965–1985

Ritts

2017

Environ Plan D

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Music can enrich geographical efforts to understand ideology as a lived experience. This paper explores the history of whale music – instrumental music that samples or thematizes whale sound. For environmentalists who came of age in the late 1960s, whale music fostered new interrogations about the identity of nature and the nature of identity, interrogations that reflected structural changes in North American society. To understand whale music’s surprising ideological power, I draw on Althusser’s formative idea of interpellation, and refine it with insights from Antonio Gramsci, John Mowitt, and Neil Smith. As examples from British Columbia’s Lower Mainland and California’s Bay Area reveal, whale music interpellated environmentalists, capturing the energies of predominantly white middle-class subjects eager to develop new relationships with nature. Whale music was not discovered, as its devotees proposed it was, but invented, through a combination of animal sounds, recording techniques, consumer trends, and ideologies of nature. It reveals environmentalism as a sonorous formation – a system that recruits listeners into sonically-mediated realms of thought, action, and subjectivity.

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Space within Space: Artificial Reverb and the Detachable Echo

Abstract: Doepfer. A-199 spring reverb, ca. 2015.

Cited by 28 publications

References 12 publications

Lo-fi Today

Lo-fi Today

Reverberation Time and Musical Emotion in Recorded Music Listening

Environmentalists abide: Listening to whale music – 1965–1985

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