OUR LOSS OF EMOTIONAL RICHNESS DUE TO BAD
SOUND REPRODUCTION
or
THE URGENT NEED TO PRESERVE ANALOG SOUND IN
AUDIO, TV, CABLE, SATELLITE DISHES, AND
VIDEO CASSETTES UNTIL DIGITAL SOUND IS PERFECTED
©1996
The Anstendig Institute
Regarding the universal loss of emotional
richness and spiritual depth in modern man’s frames of reference
An
understanding of the dominance of sound over sight is crucial to understanding
how the richness of our lives has been degraded by digital sound, the current
versions of which, including HDCD, are incapable of accurately capturing
emotional subtleties. We are literally losing the most important part of our
souls: refined, highly differentiated emotional experience, which is our
birthright for being born in the 20th century.
The refined emotional
experiences captured in art represent the summation of all that has come
before. Only in the 20th century has mankind obtained a means of preserving
sounds, with all their nuances, and repeating them over and over in the same way.
Suddenly, all the emotional richness of experience contained in the musical
compositions of the past, present, and future can be available to us with their
rich range of emotional experience. That is our heritage, our birthright, if
you will. After coming close to achieving this universal cultural legacy with
the advances in analog sound of the 70’s, that precious heritage has been wiped
out by the premature introduction of digital recording technology, before it
was perfected.1 The emotions experienced when listening to digital music are
not the emotions of the original performance because the digital recording does
not contain them. What is experienced lacks those expressive subtleties that
refine a human being.
The late Virgil Thomson, dean
of American composers and music critics, quoted an institute paper to define
the role of music in life:
The Anstendig Institute,
musico-acoustical investigators in
Music
is the highest, most powerful, most overriding, of all the arts. In the
presence of music, all the other arts take on the character of the music, not
vice versa, and it is capable of, and can produce in us, the finest, most
delicate, of possible human reactions. 2
That quotation also applies to
sound and sight in general: we experience life through the five senses. Sight
and hearing are the primary senses, which means that our lives are made up
predominantly of visual images and sounds. In fact, our inner, mental world consists
mainly of sights and sounds, with thoughts, i.e., sound, being our most common
mental activity. Since life is predominantly sight and sound, understanding the
dominance of sonic impressions over visual impressions3 (i.e., sounds over
images) is crucial to understanding life. When both images and sound are
present, sound determines the character of experience, i.e., the visual takes
on the character of the sound, not vice versa. Sound, not sight, conveys the
deepest, richest, most powerful of our experiences. Through sounds we acquire
our vast frame of reference of emotional qualities. Through hearing we become
familiar with and learn to differentiate between the enormous range of nuances
of emotional qualities from total dejection and deepest sadness to angelic
sweetness. Through music, and the other arts as well, we vicariously acquire an
emotional richness that would otherwise take hundreds of lives to acquire. Many
of the emotionally differentiated experiences we have had through controlled
perfection of art cannot be produced in real-life situations.
Our external appearance seldom
if ever conveys the full intensity of our emotional experiences. For silent
films, a whole vocabulary of extremely exaggerated gestures had to be developed
in order to convey visually any of the emotions of the characters. And those
films still had to be shown with appropriate live music to make their effect.
Furthermore, the whole meaning of the film could be changed by simply changing
the character of the music.
Consider the end of a Western
movie, with the hero riding off into the sunset. With apotheosis music, it is a
glorious, heroic ending. With a funeral march, the ending is tragic and
lugubrious. With bittersweet music, the ending is tinged with regret. With a
polka, the scene becomes a satire. For silent films, the music was usually very
carefully written out and even when the musician was a master improviser, he
followed a precise scheme of moods that was written down with appropriate cues
in advance. While we tend to take these sounds for granted, the irony remains
that they determine our experience.
While images have to be in
front of us to be seen and fine details can only be discerned if they are in
the center of our vision, all the subtleties of sounds can be heard from any
angle. We do not have to be next to or facing a person to hear his/her pain,
happiness, bitterness, resentfulness, cunning, etc. Films allow everyone to
have a close, intimate view of the protagonists from the very best viewing
angle. Yet it is still the music that determines a film’s success, not the
visuals. Many scenes from the Star Wars Trilogy, for example, would be a mess
of sloppy images, were it not for some of the best music in films. And ET
taking off to the skies on a bicycle with his friends would just seem silly if
the orchestra did not break out into that glorious theme just as the bicycle
takes off. Watch ET without the sound, and see if your heart still jumps up
into your throat. It won’t! Watch it with digitally re-mastered sound and see
if the experience is the same. It won’t be!
The current video release of
Star Wars has lost most of its riveting effect because the sound has been
digitally re-mastered. Most people think that the poorer visual quality and the
narrower screen have ruined the effect. But the real reason is that the digital
sound no longer contains the original expressive content.
The dominance of sound over
visual images has implications which are far greater than immediately apparent.
When we have understood and thoroughly digested the primary nature of sound, it
has to become clear that, since sound-reproduction is now the main source of
sounds in our lives, a universal form of sound reproduction that is unable to
capture the differentiations of emotional qualities contained in sounds will
drastically reduce the richness of our lives and ultimately impair our
emotional well being.
For centuries, philosophers and
mystics have believed that we live not only from food and oxygen, but we also
live from impressions. Hazrat Inayat Khan explains throughout his “Sufi
Message” series: reduce or take away our food or oxygen and we suffer or die;
reduce or take away our impressions and we also suffer and sometimes die.4
The Institute For Human Communication Research in Raleigh, NC, possesses third-
party research materials showing that “the human brain itself becomes shaped
both anatomically and physiologically by the action of communication with its
parents and community. The fulfillment of the developmental process, only
initiated in the zygote and employing genetic processes as but one among many
others, appears to require active communication with mother, both parents, and
its local society including its physical environment [in order to adequately
grow and develop]. The primates, and Man in particular, require such
communication and community in order to express and physically develop
an individual’s potential form and abilities.” Those studies also show that the
sonic influences to which a child is subjected at various ages profoundly
determine not only the child’s well-being, but the ability to master essential
and advanced skills. Also children subjected to particular sonic stimuli at
crucial ages, easily develop certain abilities. But children not subjected to
the requisite sonic impressions at the proper times, will probably never
develop those abilities, or have great difficulty doing so. One well-known
example is the ability to master languages. Since hearing is the most powerful
of the senses, sonic communications with the parents and environment most
strongly affect the child’s development.
The Anstendig Institute
believes that distorted sounds, produced by flawed reproduction systems are at
the root of many of the medical neuroses that characterize our age. This loss
of emotional richness and refinement is also a major culprit in the callousness
and crime problems of our age, because the humanizing aspects of sound that
affect us positively, that uplift us and give us reason to lead moral lives,
were lost in the reproduction of the sounds, with which we are surrounded. Yes,
machines have dehumanized society. But it is not the everyday mechanical
machines generally thought to be the culprits. Sound-reproduction machines have
eliminated the emotional richness and depth of expression in the world we live
in.
Even live music has lost much
of those qualities because today’s musicians, who have grown up listening to,
and studying, music with inadequate sound reproduction, have lost their
expressive richness and even emulate the distortions of sound reproduction in
their own tone production. Sounds and the emotions conveyed by them are too
much a part of the make-up of society as a whole as well as our individual
lives for this to be anything less than a universal tragedy. It is not the way
life was meant to be.
A noted psychiatrist at the
Langley Porter Institute at the University of California in San Francisco, Dr.
Peter Ostwald, M.D., recognized our Institute’s warnings, dating back to the
early 1980’s, about the probable effects of the acceptance of unperfected
digital technology: “I was fascinated by his original theories, which included
the daring proposition that due to its inability to record subtle changes
between notes, the then-developing digital technology might be detracting from
listeners’ perception of emotional nuances in musical instruments and the human
voice.” After nearly two decades of digital recordings, that has, in fact,
already happened: we now live in a society that suffers from a general
impairment of its ability to perceive and experience emotional nuances. Worse,
people no longer are aware of the finer differentiations of emotional qualities
and no longer listen for them.
This lack of emotional
differentiation in the recordings we have been brought up on has been going on
for nearly a century. Analog recordings did capture the expressive-emotional
qualities in the recording process. But the playback equipment seldom
reproduced what was on the records. And, tragically, when that equipment was
finally perfected to the requisite degree of accuracy and the public became
aware of the need to use equalizers to adjust the sound, the recording industry
changed prematurely to a digital system that was not yet adequately developed.
Unfortunately, they did not realize that they were playing with the
sensitivities of the whole of mankind, since digital recordings have now become
the nearly universal sonic experiences.
The deficiencies of the digital
systems used in currently available products are scientific fact, not a matter
of opinion. Even musically naive people were able to hear the differences in
controlled experiments5 at The Anstendig Institute. The lack of opportunity to
hear both digital and analog versions of the same sonic program is at the root
of the public acceptance of digital sound. The public would not be so accepting
if they had the opportunity and the time to hear the difference and experience
the differing emotional effects of properly reproduced analog and digital
sound.
The important and universal
effects of the shortcomings of present digital technology make it crucial to
improve the technology and, until then, preserve analog sound sources. That is
not being done. Instead of improving the digital technology in digital sound
tracks, most important movies are already being filmed with four or more
channel digital surround-sound, a system that has even less expressive detail
than stereo CDs. New smaller CD-type formats, with even less sonic definition
have been introduced. Most radio stations use CD recordings exclusively. Video
cassettes are now being released with digitally re-mastered sound, even old
films with perfectly good analog sound. This is the ultimate madness, because
the sound system on the video cassettes is analog. The analog sound is first re-mastered
into digital sound and then re-mastered back to analog to put it on the
cassette. Thus there are two more electronic processes between the source and
the listener, which necessarily results in some deterioration in the sound,
even if the digital system were perfect.
“DSS”-type 18-inch satellite
dish systems all have digital sound, which is ridiculous: most satellite
transmissions have to be analog until well after the year 2000 because of the
equipment in the satellites which are already up there. In effect, DSS takes an
analog sound track from the satellites and converts it to digital before play
back, then converts it back to analog so it can play through the speakers. The
public mistakenly thinks that the fact that it has been digitized means it is
getting high quality sound.
There remains one single source
of sound that has not yet been universally changed to digital. Cable TV is
still analog in the Bay Area and most parts of the country. All cable companies
have plans to change over to digital sound in the future. It is imperative that
they preserve analog sound until perfected digital audio is released, because
changing to present digital systems will cut off mankind’s last source of
programs that still contain the emotional qualities we crave.
What is the ultimate solution,
beyond simply saving the analog cable TV that is left? Digital has replaced
analog too completely to consider going back. Analog equipment is no longer
around. Digital manufacturers must finally bring out the right digital system.
Many good ones are on their drawing boards already and only await agreement on
a universal format. But one warning: a sampling rate under 300,000 samples per
second will not be adequate. A larger storage medium (a larger or much denser
CD disc, for example), must be used to prevent compromise with a lower sampling
rate, like the systems already in use. The sampling rate must be approximately
500,000 samples per second to equal and improve on analog sound. This decision
affects all of humanity. The source of our sonic experiences is not just
another product to buy. It is just as important as the purity of medical products
and the safety and fuel efficiency of our cars. Since sound reproduction media
is the chief source of our sonic impressions and ”canned” sound is becoming
ever more unavoidable in our lives, a vast aspect of the future of humanity
actually rests on the outcome.
1 A large enough storage media did not
exist that could contain all the necessary information that would have to be
saved if the system had had an adequately high sampling and bit rate. Digital
sound was brought out with less than a tenth of the necessary sampling rate and
a bit rate that is at least four bits too small.
2 Virgil Thomson, “
3 Unfortunately, a shift in mankind’s
basic orientations has clouded our ability to recognize this truth. The advent
of photography and TV, the emergence of the independent individual rather than
the spatial dependence upon the group (family) for survival, and the time-sight
orientation of our busy modern day schdules have changed our general
orientation to sight rather than hearing (see our papers “”The Misapplication of Visual criteria in Hearing and
Sound-Reproduction” and “Hearing,
The Informational and The Experiential”). And ever present background music
has conditioned us to ignore sound. But the fact that the general public’s
orientation is primarily towards time and towards seeing and secondarily
towards hearing, does not change the fact that, when sounds accompany visual
images, the sounds determine the emotional content of that which we see. Nor
does it change the fact that sound, not sight, is our primary source of emotional
richness. Those who follow Astrology will be interested to know that a
4 Babies deprived of sensory stimulation
often die. Solitary confinement in most prisons is considered to be the most
intense form of punishment because of sensory deprivation, primarily sight and
sound. There are many more such examples.
5 Carried out according to the procedures
set forth in our paper “AB testing, a Misapplication
of Visual Criteria in Audio”.
The Anstendig Institute is a
non-profit research and educational institute that studies the vibrational
influences in our environment, particularly those of sight and sound, and how
they affect sensory perception. Its papers on sound reproduction, problems of
focusing in photography, psychology of hearing and seeing, and erratic
vibrational influences that affect our lives are widely distributed throughout
the world. All are available free of charge.