Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Actively listening to music....

Ok, guys, or at least bray, may I have permission to use this post as my own with the following changes:

Instead of "Mother and Girlfriend" it's "Wife and Grandkids" And when my Wife saw the Axiom "Golden Girl" and asked about her meaning, she suggested that I Too, have "Golden Ears" (Her comment)

I Don't Think She Was Paying Me A Complement!!

I'm one of the "dim the lights, sit in the sweet spot and do nothing else" guys. If I want background noise, I'll fire up MusicMatch and let it run. But if I'm listening to my Axioms, then dammit, I'm listening to my Axioms. And yeah, I have the luxury of being a single guy and master of my domain.

I mainly sit in the sweet spot when I listen to music.I don't get to do this as much as I would like though.I do most of my listening when I can be home alone.

Hey Mark:
I’m a self-diagnose ADD’er ... know what ,you seem to have the symptoms as well: multitasking and hyperfocusing.(hyperfocusing: I infer that from the amount of data on most of your posts )

I study cello when I was a kid and spent most of my teen years playing on strings and full orchestras.
In order to be able to distinguish instruments in a full orchestra you first needs to ,of course, familiarize yourself with each instrument sound charasterisics then, and more importantly, how each section of the orchestra sounds ( Strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion) . I suggest you to get some chamber music compositions to learn each instrument, then move to non-chamber music but stay exclusively with each section ( strings, brass, woodwinds), this will train your ear on how each section sounds. For instance, a single French horn sound is quite different to 5-6 French horns playing in a brass section on a concert hall, which btw, the concert hall play a huge part in their sound. You’ll need to spend extra time with the woodwind section, they had the most instruments and some sound very similar. Their timbre is not bright so they usually get buried in a full orchestra.

I agree with what JaimeG said. You need to be familiar with the individual instuments in an orchestra before you can pick each one out individually.

I grew up in a home where my parents played classical music pretty much 99% of the time. My mom told me that before I was 5, I would pick out a certain group of instruments in a piece I was hearing and hum along, even it wasn't the melody.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it helps to have been 'steeped' in it. I'm still pretty good at filtering the music from an orchestra or ensemble and listing with fairly good accuracy which instuments are in the mix.

Quick answer :

1. You can fix your attention problem by putting all the coffee and expresso machines in the garage for a couple of weeks. The headaches will go away eventually.

2. I have had a number of chances to listen to a good stereo (>$25k, well spent) in a well designed and treated room and the sound was still way better than anything I hear today. The thing that pleases me is that I think I have speakers that are up to the task now (based on how their sound changes as I optimize placement for different aspects) so I just need the right room. Having said that, I think the sound in my current room is good enough that it does not significantly interfere with my ability to HEAR different instruments, but I know it could sound even better if I had time to work on the room some more. Since I hope to be moving in 6 months that's not a priority though.

3. I do sit motionless in the sweet spot whenever possible; it's just that I have much less time for that now than I did 20 years ago.

4. IMO the most important thing for good hearing is having time to let the music "soak into you". The real joys of listening to good music don't come from individual instruments, they come from the more subtle interplay between sections of an orchestra, banks of instruments "coming together" then diverging etc...

You can't hear that stuff unless you are totally focussed on the music, and it's hard to totally focus on the music if you are juggling too many things in life. You don't NEED drugs to listen well but they sure did help you focus on one thing at a time

I'm told it's the same thing with astronomy. If you practice observing and stay practiced you can see far more than a novice observer even if their eyes are better than yours. It does take time -- the critical thing is training your brain re: what to look for -- and it does take practice to stay current.

I find if I set aside a couple of hours a week for listening, at a regular time, that some of this starts to come back. Otherwise, I have "the attention span of a gnat" as I have been told on several occasions.

Maybe upgrading to M80s would help

In reply to:

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You don't NEED drugs to listen well but they sure did help you focus on one thing at a time

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You know, now that you mention it John, that reminds me that there was another huge variable between listening to Hendrix then and anything else now!

I guess the good news about "now" is that I don't have to bake a tube of those Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies to take care of the munchies!