How to evaluate and interpret what we read and hear in a musical review: history and current events
Yes, you read that right: reading and writing about music and not music, is what I want to talk about.
Write about music, that is, using words to convey to the reader what the editor has heard audibly, is not a simple and immediate thing. As you can well imagine we are talking about "information" collected with one of the 5 fundamental senses: hearing. This information subsequently processed by our brain will become reactions and emotions.
Today, thanks to the advent of technology, it is apparently "easier" to represent a sound. Indeed, it seems "sufficient" register it and attach it to the article. The intended quote on "easy" and "sufficient" is due to the fact that in this process numerous factors come into play that can alter reality. Without going into psychoacoustics and remaining on more technical parameters, we can remember that recording a sound and then presenting it is a complex and variable thing: shooting technique, type of microphone, preamplifier, recording system, quality of equipment, etc .; moreover, all this will subsequently interface with the listening system of the reader / listener => sound card, monitor, listening environment, etc. But one thing is undeniable: i audio files attachments, despite the different biases, allow the reader / listener to "understand" the sound of the tested product and to discuss audio by listening to sounds. At the same time, the author of the article, having tested the tool directly, will be able to highlight and share the salient features and particular aspects of the product.
What is certain is that writing ed audio attached they will travel more and more in unison complementing each other and making the information transmitted more complete.
In years 70 80 with the flourishing of Hi-Fi magazines and Musical instruments, in the absence of modern technology, it became essential to find and use the right words to be able to express and transfer to the readers those auditory / cerebral sensations experienced by the authors during the tests.
Obviously, before writing what you heard, you had to describe the base of operation, that is: how the test was performed, the listening position and position, the equipment used, etc. to be able to recreate, at least imaginatively, a standard from which to start. So and finally, the description of what you were listening to.
At this point, to facilitate communication, they were minted specific terms, often borrowed from other non-musical definitions that succeeded in description. These statements, when analyzed in absolute terms, may appear to have no real meaning. We find in fact in the musical articles expressions like: granite basses, lashed basses, glassy highs, ethereal highs, mixed mids, scratchy winds, drilling distortions ... ..
Who is not fond of music e music technologies, reading these statements will surely take for crazy, or at least consider it extravagant, whoever wrote them and who reads them carefully. The community of musicians and audiophiles instead they will perfectly understand what the sentence refers to and in some cases they will be able to imagine the whole thing audibly.
Of course, how can horns be "scratchy", at least for an ordinary mortal, but I assure you that for the experts this term evokes a precise auditory sensation.
Hence, during the development of specialized magazines, making a virtue of necessity, a new one was created musical descriptive lexicon it then became a standard and is still used today, despite new technologies and the network.
For the record, it should be remembered that there was also one intermediate stage, before the advent of multimedia files via the internet, and it was that of CD attached to magazines. The media contained the audio files with the tests carried out. Paradoxically, this “primordial” multimedia phase was also a more “controlled-standard” phase because the files were always produced in the same conditions as - editorial studies - and therefore easily comparable. However, many of the limitations and biases mentioned above remained.
So, in summary, when let's read of music and more, the editor and the editor of the magazine act as guarantors of what is written. When we listen tests of instruments or musical equipment, so that everything is clearer, it is advisable to always ask ourselves the following question: besides the instrument what am I listening to and how am I listening to it?
What is certain, as already mentioned above, is that increasingly writing and audio / video-attached will travel together complementing each other.
We are or we are not in the XNUMXst century.
