adsr and lfo abolish (Don goes off the deep end again)

[Don Tillman]

   From: Martin Czech <martin.czech at intermetall.de>
   Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 11:01:12 +0200 (MET DST)

   The human ear is in some way optimised for speech recognition.  If you
   take a look at the sensitivity curves from psychoacoustic books, where
   is the maximum? Where the main energy of speech is!  

I'll disagree with that.  I'll claim that the ear is optimized to
discern the process that is causing a given noise.

Consider the requirements of survival.  When meeting with some new
*thing* an animal needs to immedately know the answers to two
questions:

  1. Is it dangerous?
  2. Is it food?

And of course we humans, being higher up on the evolutionary scale,
have a third question in mind after the first two:

  3. Is it art?

So if there's some noise event, any animal of a species that is still
around on this planet is going to have mastered the art of figuring
out what is causing that noise, how far away it is, which direction
it's heading, how dangerous it is and so forth.

For example, while standing in line at the Post Office the other day I
heard a song on the radio that featured a Hammond Organ.  I could
plainly tell it was a real Hammond even though I had never heard the
song before and it was a dirt cheap radio in a ridiculous acoustic
environment with an awful lot of other distracting sounds.  It's not a
special skill on my part, anybody could do it, just as anybody can
pick out a Stratocaster over a telephone and my dog can identify the
sound of my Volkswagen approaching when it's a block away.

Our ears are remarkably sensitive to sound-making processes, and can
readily discern the cause of a sound and identify the process that is
responsible.  Better than anything else.  

How does that affect us, the synthesizer designers?  I think it's
important to keep in mind that the synth is just another process (or
set of processes) that can make great sounds.  That's how the ear is
going to hear it.  The ear isn't going to care about curves,
waveforms, harmonic spectra or any of that, although those are
important descriptive tools for us.  The ear hears a process going on
and tries to relate with it.  And the synth player sees a process in
front of him and tries to mess with it to make some cool sounds.

  -- Don