Learning Frequencies?

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Golden Ears I reckon, comprehensive.

http://www.moultonlabs.com/full/product01

Saying that, you could almost do the same thing with pink noise generator and EQ, boosting/cutting each frequency band in turn. 
 
Is this for live mixing? Or mixing in general?

There are some online trainers that can be useful but I haven't used them much. (Though I imagine frequent practice could only help). You literally just listen to sine waves as practice. Personally I often just mess around with eq's (either while mixing or while bored).
I'd teach myself what certain instruments sound like depending on what boosts or cuts you apply.

I know a friend who is pitch perfect. He can literally play any piece he hears on piano after hearing it once; I asked him how he did this and he said just with practice and time. Also he mainly just hears the intervals. Engineering can be like this too. There's only a few frequencies I could identify exactly and that's more through technical knowledge and experience. I believe frequency bands would be more important than singular frequencies (but I assume you know this fully).

So what I'd say is to learn the sound of various bands of frequencies and then teach yourself to identify the intervals between these bands.

Hope that is in someway helpful.

Rob
 
Thanks so much guys for all you interest and suggestions.

So far we have:
- Practice and mess around with EQs (thanks RAM)
- Concentrate on frequency bands (thanks RAM) using pink noise and filters (thanks Jim50hertz)
- Link to feedback trainer (I have a Mac so couldn't check it out immediately)
- Link to "Golden Ears" Resources

My piano teacher taught me that the trick to teaching your brain to recognize notes is to learn them very slowly starting with just 3 notes, sort of one low, one mid and one high. Once the brain has learned these start adding more one at a time. Therefore applying this to audio:

Start by learning 4 bands, Low, Low-Mid, High-Mid, High using pink noise and filters, then add more bands as you develop.


RAM said:
Is this for live mixing? Or mixing in general?

A little bit of both really. At the moment I do a lot of live work, so it would be good to be able to identify resonant Freq. and Feedback Freq. quickly. But I'm thinking more broadly for audio professionals recording and mixing. Just developing the ear. I'm thinking of tapping into the collective knowledge base here at Prodigy-Pro and create a document that will hopefully provide some sort of "best practice" information for anybody wanting to improve their ears (I certainly do).

Let's cover some basics...

- Is "hearing" our weakest sense? And how difficult is it to improve it?
- Should we learn to recognize frequencies (such as 100Hz, 1KHz, 10KHz) or notes (such as Middle C3 130.81Hz A4 440Hz)?
- So far I know that frequency is affected by the speed of sound which is affected by Altitude, Pressure, Temperature, Humidity. Am I correct? and is there anything else?

I hope to compile all this info into a document outlining an effective technique to learn frequencies that will benefit all those who are interested on this forum.

Basically I'm just asking for some info on how people have trained their ears and if they are willing to share any advise, tricks and techniques and any ideas on what's the best way to do this.

Thanks in advance.
 
I'll verify Golden Ears is worth every penny. Having said that, i didn't have to pay for it b/c I used as curriculum for one of my classes in college.  We only got through the first few sections and that alone has been a HUGE help.  The tests can be done over and over again without becoming redundant.  After the class I ventured into the later sections and let me say, it gets challenging.  You have to choose from the 31 freq bands on a standard graphic eq, and you listen to pink noise and have to tell boost or cut and what freq. Later on they get to 2 freq boost or cut at a time.  Then you move to the same stuff with music.  Then they get into ms delay times.  Its pretty intense.

For live mixing its great for training you to be a human RTA and can tune the monitor system MUCH quicker, for studio it just saves you a lot of time and trouble finding trouble freqs or mixing in general.  Basically gives you essential training when it comes to this business.  I love it, and still listen to it now and again.
 
RAM said:
I'd teach myself what certain instruments sound like depending on what boosts or cuts you apply. 

Along this line, I've got a somewhat useful HTML-based chart floating around that shows the typical frequency bands of several instruments. Worth commiting any gig-relevant instruments to memory, or at least as an initial reference for guiding mic selection prior to site recording. iirc it ran most of the orchestral gamut, my main thought was to hang onto it in case I found myself recording some classical. I'll try and dig it up.

+1 for golden ears, I borrowed it on a road trip and had a blast with it. If I wasn't so hard up for project cash, I'd buy it straight away.
 
Tune stage monitors as often as possible. That drummed it into me very well. You'll be surprised how quickly you get used to quite a wide range of freqs. It helps if the brand, design and venue varies.

HTH

Dominic
 
grantlack said:
RAM said:
I'd teach myself what certain instruments sound like depending on what boosts or cuts you apply. 

Along this line, I've got a somewhat useful HTML-based chart floating around that shows the typical frequency bands of several instruments. Worth commiting any gig-relevant instruments to memory, or at least as an initial reference for guiding mic selection prior to site recording. iirc it ran most of the orchestral gamut, my main thought was to hang onto it in case I found myself recording some classical. I'll try and dig it up.
As you say, it's been floating around (since 1927 IIRC). I think that, as it is, it's almost useless, because it doesn't show what are the frequencies that are defining the sound signature of the instrument. In short, although the male vocal range extends from 100 to 10kHz, most of the sonic signature is between 350-3k; that's what allows differentiating Elvis Presley from Eddie Murphy. But the rest of the frequency range is also important, low frequencies for the chesty voice and high frequencies for the sensation of closeness.
In addition, some of these charts indicate only the fundamental, restricting the male vocal to 100-1kHz.
Do you know that, although the lowest frequency of the double-bass is 40 Hz, you can get a very satisfactory rendition with a recording chain that cuts off at 80 Hz? That's because the audition process has the ability to "synthesize" the missing fundamentals from the harmonics (mind, no seriously trained pro would get fooled by that).
There is a common idea floating around that with the help of a chart and a real-time analyser, one can learn to mix in two lessons, but nothing replaces the impregnation, listening to tones, voices and instrument and fiddling with parametric or graphic EQ's.
 
Go to your FoH jobs and record what you do. Listen to your recordings the next day to evaluate what you have done frequency- and dynamicswise.
Try to do as many monitor jobs as you can get. You will find time enough to play with EQs to find (or create) feedbacks. Learning by doing. Nothing is better.
 
Matthew Jacobs said:
- Is "hearing" our weakest sense? And how difficult is it to improve it?
- Should we learn to recognize frequencies (such as 100Hz, 1KHz, 10KHz) or notes (such as Middle C3 130.81Hz A4 440Hz)?
- So far I know that frequency is affected by the speed of sound which is affected by Altitude, Pressure, Temperature, Humidity. Am I correct? and is there anything else?

The Human Hearing is actually pretty awesome: i think we just don't use it as well as we can. (or maybe most people don't as most people haven't trained their hearing. Though that was probably your point.)

On the second point I'm going to be ambiguous and say learn both. But learning various bands is probably more helpful for engineering. Learning the notes would aid engineering to but would be more beneficial musically. It's always helpful if you can recognise that an instrument is out of tune.

Don't forget that the widely forgotten differences between pitch perception and frequency. Since we're generally concerned about the pitch of a sound; a good study of psychoacoustics is necessary. Our brain does all sorts of crazy things while processing sounds. (Like Abbey road said it even makes us think we're hearing fundamentals even if they aren't present). Also the perceived pitch of a sound changes depending on it's intensity.

Rob

Edit:

grantlack said:
Along this line, I've got a somewhat useful HTML-based chart floating around that shows the typical frequency bands of several instruments. Worth commiting any gig-relevant instruments to memory, or at least as an initial reference for guiding mic selection prior to site recording. iirc it ran most of the orchestral gamut, my main thought was to hang onto it in case I found myself recording some classical. I'll try and dig it up.

Don't forget that timbre plays a huge role in our perception of instrumentation. It unfortunately can be a hugely subjective aspect that isn't exactly related to the spectrum of a sound. Basically even though an instruments range lies between an interval: it's all about the actual tones in that interval that are produced. Not all instruments produce just harmonically related tones alongside their notes. Some have non integer partials too. Knowing the frequency band of particular instruments is always a great starting point especially if you're dealing with something new.

I must give that Golden Ears thing a try if I ever manage to find money in my wallet.
 
This is super interesting...

Maybe I should rephrase the question: How can we improve our hearing?

I know this is a crazy subject (psycho-acoustics, perception, levels, room, monitors, et cetera) and it takes a long time.

I have noticed that over the years my hearing has improved. I'm hearing frequencies better with all the fundamentals and harmonics. I'm hearing changes in dynamics better, both fast and slow. I'm hearing spaces better and I'm hearing delays much better. This has been the result of much experimentation, learning from others, reading books such as "Understanding and Crafting the Mix" and "Critical Listening Exercises". But I am impatient and would like to develop my hearing much further. That is why I am searching for information, exercises and techniques to help us engineers.

I still got to work on hearing small amounts of distortion, phase and comb filtering.

I would like to develop my hearing both for live work and mixing, so really sound engineering in general. I would like to make a list of all the aspects that one needs to focus on when listening (combining the info presented thus far):

INDIVIDUAL SOUNDS:
- Frequency (Fundamentals, harmonics, overtones) (resonance and standing waves if capturing with a mic) (Timbre and mic position)
- Distortion
- Noise
- Reflections and problem with spill (if capturing with mics)

COMBINING SOUNDS:
- Masking
- Beating
- Phase / Comb Filtering
- Space / Panning


TRAIN THE EAR FOR:
- Frequency
- Transients and dynamics
- Delays


It seems from all the responses that the 2 mains ways to improve your hearing is through PRACTICE and HARD WORK

Which is not such a bad thing after all... separates the men from the boys...
 
Mess around with pink noise.

Put some on a track and then put up an eq and start turning knobs. This is the sound of freqs as well as the resonance and phase shift of the eq.

Bypass the eq and move your head around. This is comb filtering and reps and eq shift from reflections reaching your ears out of phase with the direct signal mostly in the high freqs.

Also, for fun, add another track with another signal generator and set them to the same tone, ie 500hz square wave, and assign a delay to one of the tracks with %100 mix and no feedback. Mess around with the time and this is raw phasing. 

As for the real world, ringing out monitors is great experience. Just memorize the 31 bands before anyone asks and you'll do fine! It's kinda funny when people call out freqs that aren't on the graph... ::) I'm often wrong by an octave+, but no one really cares.





 
bitman said:
Here is a free feedback trainer. It's free and might help.

http://johnsonaudioworks.com/html/downloads.html

I just checked this out today. Really cool little program. A great tool to get started.

Thanks Bitman for the link

J
 
Matthew Jacobs said:
- Is "hearing" our weakest sense? And how difficult is it to improve it?

Just chimed in for this...

Actually it's our most sensitive sense. We're capable of detecting pressure variations of less than one billionth of atmospheric pressure. The threshold of hearing corresponds to air vibrations on the order of a tenth of an atomic diameter!

 
Hearing and listening are 2 different things. How many times have you 'heard' something new listening to a recording you've heard 10+ times? That's what we can get better at.
 
Hearing is wonderful and our ears are wonderful.

I think my point is that, in general they are underdeveloped. I mean, for example, many people can edit video successfully. I don't mean to diss video editors but I believe that it is something many people can do because our sense of vision is highly developed.

Mixing audio on the other hand... not everyone can do it successfully. Many people think they can (think bedroom producer/musician - obviously some do... just making a generalized point), but the reality is different...

I think, although our hearing system is extremely advanced it is usually under developed and under used.

Now the question is still how can we learn to develop and improve our hearing?
 
Matthew Jacobs said:
Now the question is still how can we learn to develop and improve our hearing?

I think leaning to play improvisational acoustic music where you have to listen to everything while producing the best tone possible for the moment is bootcamp. I don't think I'd be as good as an engineer if I never studied jazz.

Reading symphonic scores is also pretty interesting.

While I was out tonight, I realized that listening to as many conversations as possible might be good training as well.
 
So I've just been experimenting this week at work with a tone generator whilst mixing.

I used a sine wave tone generator in the headphones to help me identify problem areas in the mix. So I would listen to a instrument in the speakers, listen for what frequency was bugging me, then, using the headphones, swept through the frequencies until I found the one I was looking for. I then used the parametric EQ to cut it out.

This worked surprisingly well. My mixes are getting clearer and more defined. It got easier and easier to get the frequencies right. I realized that, all my life I could definitely hear the problems, I just could not work out exactly which frequencies they were until I got help from a signal generator. In the past I would be close, or eventually get there after several minutes, but I wanted to improve my speed. 

So, I'm definitely on a quest to improve my mixing by being able to co-ordinate what I hear (frequencies) with what I do (EQ).

Is this a good way to go about it? I guess that if I keep on doing this, in 1 - 2 years I'll be able the work out the frequencies without the help of a signal generator.

J
 

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