[LAU] [New music]: Kisses don't lie, a ballad

[David Kastrup]

jonetsu <jonetsu at teksavvy.com> writes:

> On Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:27:29 +0200 (CEST)
> "Jeanette C." <julien at mail.upb.de> wrote:
>
>> thanks for this very detailed and critical feedback. I suppose I'm
>> caught between two chairs here: the tension and increase of energy -
>> in some way - and the current pop production and loudness war. Two
>> sides not readily consolable. :)
>
> As I progress in that field, it seems more and more that the loudness
> thing has nothing to do with it.  That loudness, and energy as mentioned
> before, are not necessarily linked.

To add some data point from a marginally related field: I am playing
accordion and also have a first generation Roland FR-1b digital
accordion.  The latter is bellows pressure sensitive but it's hard
finding any sensitivity setting that is satisfactory: changes in
pressure do too little, and on the little that they do, they do too
much.  Basically working with bellows pressure feels like fiddling with
a volume dial: _only_ loudness changes.  Now that's not entirely correct
since we are talking about multisamples here, but it feels like that in
comparison.

On an acoustic instrument, the sound is determined by chopping an air
stream into pieces with a metal reed vibrating through a reed gap in the
aluminum reed plate and powered by the air stream.

The amount of air an accordion will let through is limited so the
resistance grows with the pressure.  Volume is proportional to the
amount of air going through, but the overtone content changes with the
amplitude of the reed which follows pressure more leasurely the lower
the reed gets.  Also as pressure increases, multiple reeds sounding at
once for each note get phase-locked tighter.  So something happens and
you can unfurl a tone or even a chord and the whole tonal and balance
between pitches changes with pressure.

The result is that you play around a lot with intensity while the
accompanying loudness contributes less than one would expect to the
overall change in character and tone.

At least in the comparatively early digital accordion model I possess,
this characteristic of an acoustic instrument is reflected in a manner I
find less than satisfactory.

And I find part of that lies with too much of expressive changes getting
reflected in mere loudness rather than something feeling like tonal
intensity.

-- 
David Kastrup