“LIVE SOUND” and resonant acoustics

One of the most important problems of modern musical culture is the issue of improving the processes of sound recording and its adequate reproduction. Sound recording, which has expanded the audience of listeners of symphonic, chamber, folk, pop music by many orders of magnitude, is one of the most important technical achievements of the twentieth century.

At the same time, even at the modern technological level of development of sound recording and sound reproducing equipment, the two most global contradictions of this type of musical art have not yet been resolved.

First, sound recording, even at the highest level (digital recording, laser media, minimizing the “technical” noise background), remains a kind of “alienation” of a person from the sound reality of “live” musical (vocal or instrumental) sound.

Secondly, during sound recording, the effect of direct, direct contact between the performer and the listener is lost.

The proposed for consideration resonant acoustic system allows, in my opinion, to completely remove the first of the named contradictions and partially – the second.

As you know, the essence of the acoustic process is the transition from the physical to the mental, from the objective phenomenon of vibrations in the air to the subjective mental image, from the inanimate to the living. Acoustic measurements, as a rule, are not adequate to the musical-psychological description, because sound, according to leading musicologists, is a fact of energy, not matter. The psychoacoustic sphere of the perceiving subject must be balanced by a similar (anthropomorphic) element of instrumental sounds.

Therefore, among the three elements of any instrument – the exciter of vibrations, the vibrator, the resonance system – the latter is of particular importance. Among the five dimensions of sound (pitch, sound volume, timbre, duration, localization), the last one, that is, spatial localization, is also the most significant in this regard.

In the conditions of an ordinary concert hall, the task of physiological coordination with human nature is performed to a greater extent by the resonant systems of musical instruments, historically formed in accordance with the proportions of the human body.

When playing a sound recording, the same function is almost completely transferred to audio equipment, with the help of which it is necessary to achieve the most natural spatial localization of sound, to reproduce the timbre as difficult – voluminous phenomenon. Conventional acoustic systems (the authors call them “compression-type systems”) are capable of this only at spatially limited points of “optimal sound”, and even then with a greater degree of convention, since natural phonism (the effect of interaction of the vocal bodies of instruments) is initially lost.

In the proposed resonant acoustic system (RAS), the resonator is not individual objects, but the entire environment, in a sense, the natural space itself, which performs the function of resonant systems of instruments.

Thus, if “live music” relatively rarely falls into ideal conditions for sounding (the acoustics of most objects in the physical world is not consistent with the instrumental proportions, which is why, perhaps, open-air concerts succeed very rarely), then playback of its recording through the RAS “outputs” music into the living environment and harmonizes the acoustic relationship with it.

The “live” sound of RAS musical instruments is more than compensated for by the effect of super – resonance, in which an illusory sound source gets out into the surrounding space.

Bandura Andrey “LIVE SOUND” and Resonant acoustics // “Academy of Trinitarianism”, M., El No. 77-6567, publ. 10385, 05/01/2003