Aural Skills for Audio Engineers
Montclair State University asked me to develop and possibly teach a class on aural skills for audio engineers. It's a great idea! It isn't just audio engineers who need to know what frequencies and decibels are. These are concepts that any musician would benefit from knowing.
Here's my first pass at a course outline. The main problem is that this is five semesters worth of material, so I'm sure some of it (a lot of it) will get cut. But these are the things I would want to cover in an ideal world.
Unit One: Fundamentals of Acoustics
1.1 Physics of Sound
Sound pressure waves
Anatomy of the ear
Transducers
Microphones and speakers
1.2 Standing Waves
Amplitude
Frequency
Adding waves together
Phase
1.3 Noise
Mathematical definition
White noise
Pink noise
1.4 Sound Pressure Levels
Decibels
Subjective vs objective loudness
The Fletcher-Munson curve
Project: Noise Pollution
Measure the ambient noise levels in three locations: your bedroom, outside your home, and one other place where you regularly spend time. Record the average decibel level and the peaks. List the main sources of audible sound in order of loudness. Are these sound levels harmful?
Unit Two: Rhythm
2.1 Tempo
Beats per minute
Italianate tempo descriptions
The event fusion threshold at 1200 bpm
2.2 Meter
Time signatures
The tactus
Hypermeter
2.3 Syncopation
Strong and weak beats
The backbeat
Polymeter and hemiola
Tresillo and clave
2.4 Swing
Swing ratios
The special case of shuffle
Eighth note swing vs sixteenth note swing
2.5 Groove
Participatory discrepancies
Ahead of the beat vs behind the beat
Dilla time
Project: Beat Transcription
Choose a song and transcribe its drum or percussion pattern. You will get the best results from a song with a short, repeated drum or percussion pattern (four bars maximum). You can use standard notation, a time-unit box system, or the Groove Pizza. Please be sure to include the artist and title with your transcription.
Unit Three: Frequency
3.1 Pitches and Frequencies
Review of standing waves
The range of human hearing
Scientific pitch notation
Tuning, interference and beats
Subjective descriptions of frequency ranges (sub, bass, low mids, etc)
3.2 Harmonics
The natural overtone series
Harmonics and tuning
Just intonation
Inharmonics and bell tones
3.3 Equalization and Filtering
Your mouth as a filter
The parameters in a typical EQ plugin
High pass vs low pass vs bandpass
The wah-wah pedal
Project: Spectral music
Create a short piece of music on a single pitch that only changes the overtones/timbre. Use the spectrogram to help you.
Unit Four: Dynamics
4.1 Decibels and Dynamics
Review of decibels
Italianate dynamics markings
Peak vs average loudness
Attack, decay, sustain, release
4.2 Perceptual vs Actual Loudness
Performance intensity vs decibel levels
Masking
Perceptual loudness in recorded music
4.3 Gain vs Volume
Amplification
Gain staging
Headroom and clipping
4.4 Compression and Distortion
Dynamic range compression
Threshold and ratio
Attack and release
Limiter
Distortion, saturation and overdrive
Project: Make It Loud/Make It Quiet
Take a piece of music that is traditionally loud and perform or record it as quietly as possible, or take a piece of music that is traditionally quiet and perform or record it as loudly as possible (don’t hurt yourself!) Consider not just decibels, but also timbre and performance intensity.
Unit Five: Timbre
5.1 Acoustic Instruments
Instrument families
Western European orchestral instruments
Wind band instruments
Folk and country instruments
Afro-Caribbean drums and percussion
Hindustani instruments
East Asian instruments
5.2 Synthesizers
Review of harmonics and noise
Additive synthesis
Subtractive synthesis
Frequency modulation synthesis
Drum machines
Analog vs digital
The guitar amp as an analog synth
Project: Sonic Structure Graph
Choose a song recorded after 1965 and create a diagram showing all of the sound sources (instruments, voices, samples, sound effects, etc) and the measures in which they appear. If you can identify specific instruments or pieces of equipment, do so, but otherwise simply describe each sound as best you can.
Unit Six: Space
6.1 Panning and Stereo
From mono to stereo
Mid/side mixing
Multichannel audio and surround sound
6.2 Reverb
Reflection and diffusion
Natural reverb
Artificial reverb
6.3 Perceptual Distance
Loudness
Reverb
Filtering
6.4 Hearing Microphone Placement
Classical-style miking
Close miking
Project: Musical Space Graph
Select a recording made since 1960 and diagram all of the sound sources (instruments, voices etc) according to their position in musical space along the left-right and proximal-distant axes.
Unit Seven: Critical Listening
7.1 Mixing and Mastering
Track-level effects
Groups and sends
The master track
Project: Subjective and Objective Description
Give technical definitions of the following words that musicians commonly use to describe sound and explain the techniques/tools you would use to create them:
Fat vs thin
Warm vs cold
Bright vs dark
Hi-fi vs lo-fi