[MUSIC].
Psychoacoustics refers to how a sound wave in
air is transduce into a pressure wave in the ear which
becomes a mechanical wave inside
the cochlea which becomes a pattern of neural activity in the brain.
That pattern of neural activity is perceived as Led Zeppelin,
or Joni Mitchell, or Kendrick Lamar,
or Shostakovitch or whoever you might be listening to.
How does that happen?
How that simple little sensory organ transduce acoustic pressure waves into sound?
We're going to be talking in this course about pitch perception,
loudness perception, spatial localization.
How do we know where something is coming from?
How much do we have to change a signal in our mixes, let's
say to get us to believe that sound source moved?
We'll be talking about binaural listening, binaural beats.
What does that mean exactly and is that just mystic muffin kind of phenomenon or is it real?
How do we extract individual instruments from a multi-timbral signal?
How do we tell which one is which given that we only have two ears?
How do we pick apart the bass and
the saxophone when its all happening on this little cochlea,
this little snail shaped bone in our ears?
At the very end of the course,
we'll wrap it up by talking about how music professionals, sound designers,
producers, mixers, mastering engineers can use
the information that they've learned in Psychoacoustics in their professional lives.
Make no mistake, a course in Psychoacoustics or music cognition for
that matter will not give you predictive power over your music.
You'll never be able to say for sure,
if I know this I can guarantee that a listener will have this reaction to my music.
People are too complex and there are too many individual differences among us.
What you'll be able to do is be informed as to how to achieve sounds that
you want or reactions that you want from a more informed perspective.
I particularly enjoy traversing
that single tightrope in two directions
between the art of music and the science of music.
In neither domain do we have
all the answers but by talking to each other scientists and artists,
we can approach music from these two different perspectives.
It's a fun conversation and Psychoacoustics is part of that conversation.
[MUSIC]
