The Third Rail
IN SEARCH OF THE EXCEPTIONAL
THIS ISSUE: Art Dudley says six things that audio reviewers aren’t supposed to say. Ever.
“Let’s get real, real gone for a change.” —Elvis
I.
As Plato mentioned in The Sophist and thousands of art historians have noted in the years since, Greek sculptors distorted the human figure by enlarging the head and shoulders. They did it on purpose. If they didn’t, when viewed from below, it would look wrong.
Poets—real ones, I mean—distort smaller truths in order to create larger ones. Every type of musical temperament is a means of distorting the relative sizes of sub-octave intervals—or, in fixed-pitch instruments, creating compromises—in order to create a pleasing result. Human interaction is all about distorting the truth: If you always told everyone what you’re really thinking, you’d be beaten to death by the age of 9.
Except for medicine, transportation, civil engineering, and the mixing of drinks, every human endeavor involves some degree of distortion, sometimes unexpected but just as often intentional and well-accepted—and sometimes naturally occurring.
Any music recording, of even the simplest piece, contains an enormous amount and variety of information: What pitches did the performer(s) produce? What were the shapes of those notes, in terms of the proportion of attack, sustain, and decay components in each one? What were the temporal relationships between the notes—the rhythm and the pacing? In what sort of space was the music performed and recorded? How close were the performers to the listeners/microphones? What were the timbral colors of the sounds their voices and instruments produced? What were their textures? How was the sound they created? How forceful? How loud at its loudest
