[LAU] eyes verses ears

Julien Claassen julien at mail.upb.de
Thu Jul 4 21:11:29 UTC 2013


Hello Rusty!
   I didn't read the other replies, but here are a couple of thoughts.
1. Visual feedback can speed up work. Seeing is two-dimensional and 
instantaneous. So you can see something quickly, whichlistening takes a while 
to find.

2. Modern mixing techniques. Take a metal recording, you want the bassdrum at 
exactly the same instant, that the bass is playing, so you can use compressors 
and some other processing to great effect and maximum volume. The bass is 
played live and so are the drums. For drums, there have been times, where 
people used triggering of samples and then later corrected only the important 
parts via MIDI quantisation. In all other cases it's a question of cutting 
things out and moving them with precision.

3. Finding peaks and other annomalities in the frequency spectrum. You can 
hear it, but again, it can be quicker to start from the visual image.

   I'm sure there are more uses for all kinds of visualisation utilities. Some 
more useful than others. Some of these things can be managed by ear easily, 
others with difficulty and yet others might be managed by some clever 
automated analysing software. But then a computer is sometimes not as good as 
a human. It is fast, but it doesn't know much about difficult decisions. These 
would have to be programmed. They could take up CPU and they might yield bad 
results. Thus it's a question of which is more work: looking at it and doing 
it that way from scratch or using an automated system and correcting the 
errors. That's my take on it.
   One last probable addition could be, that entering things on a keyboard, 
together with the time limitation on sound, that I mentioned before, it takes 
time, is prone to errors and typos. A mouse click in such instances is very 
fast.
   Warm regards and good luck in your quest for knowledge
          Julien

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