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Re: Dark reeds?

Author: mschmidt
Date: 2007-12-12 19:11

Well, I am joining this conversation late, but I just want to add my two cents: I agree that "light" and "dark" are terribly unscientific ways of describing oboe sound, but merely substituting those terms with "more higher partials" and "fewer higher partials" would be a mistake. That's roughly what "light" and "dark" are supposed to mean, but the reason the terms end up being so vague is that nobody actually bothers to correlate their subjective perception of oboe tone with actual data showing the energy distribution amongst various frequencies. So what one person calls "more higher partials" or "bright" might sound different from what another person uses the same terms for. In the absence of any objective measure of energy distribution, merely substituting terms that sound more scientific doesn't make the perception of tone any less subjective. As I've said before on this board, people hear tones differently. That's been objectively established. So as long as we rely on our ears, and not spectrum analyzers (and they have to be damn good spectrum analyzers to distinguish the subtleties in tone we are talking about here) we are doomed to having descriptions of oboe tone which are somewhat subjective, and certainly influenced by experience and socially-constructed understandings.

Mike

Still an Amateur, but not really middle-aged anymore

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Dark reeds? new

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2007-11-29 12:16