|
Too Loud, EH?Real Instruments are Loud. Digital instruments can be much Louder. I play a digital piano and over the years have tried to reproduce exactly what I feel as I am playing the piano when recording myself. I feel sound in my chest as part of playing the piano. My audiologist explained that as we listen to music we cause little hairs in the cochlea to get excited which ultimately causes pleasure. After a while the little hairs get desensitized to that level of sound and thus it is necessary to turn up the volume to get your jollies from the music. The A & W has gone to great lengths to play my type of music through speakers which sound like the 60's and 70's. It is all computer generated no doubt, I have had environments in my sound cards on the PC for years. Interesting though, the songs which I liked the best like "White Rabbit" are barely audible. Getting Music Just loud Enough Will used to play the record player when he was little. One day he picked up my newest needle which had cost about $45, and put it on the paten of the record player. This was the first year that CD's were around, and my husband replaced the record player with a CD player. Our first two CD's were the Planets by Holst and Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. There was so much more of tubular bells on the CD it was like listening to an entirely new fascinating work, and I had the sound cranked up. Reid was boogying for the first time to the jig, then the music got quiet and he threw himself on the floor screaming "Put dah moosic back." We could hear it, but he could not. In the wonderful movie "Mr. Holland's Opus", the father was trying to accomplish the same thing by having the child sit on the speaker. Even though the CD player through amplifier to speakers ability to crank the music loudness was very high, we usually did not turn the music up for Reid. Eventually someone else turned it up and blew the speakers. It might be a good idea to mark with a sharpie marker the loudest you want your music systems played. Reid had a very expensive pair of earphones with volume control which fit his audiogram, and he could turn up the volume without deafening the rest of us. In the movie Beethoven lives Upstairs they showed Beethoven lying on and under his piano trying to hear it, cutting the legs off the piano. One of my first thoughts as I became proficient with a synthesizer was that both my father and Beethoven would have loved the instruments. Beethoven could have cranked the volume louder and louder. My dad was also a terrific pianist and played every day until he died.
Music soothes the savage beast, and we need more people singing and making music together. Headphones are Dangerous I have headphones for the piano, but it is not creating the music as I do with the body awareness of sound. Now I see people with ordinary hearing going around our too loud world with noise attenuating earphones and chosen sound going into their ears. It is very important that the manufacturers turn the volume down because when a sound is too loud, normally you stick your finger in your ears or move away from the sound quickly, which you cannot do with headphones. The beginning of television shows, and going from program to ad should be muted every time.
PAM Candlish 7 December 2005
|
|
|
