Paul's Posts — 05 January 2012
By Paul McGowan
We all know magicians are tricking us. It isn’t really gone when when they make something disappear – or is it? Do you see it? Isn’t it actually gone as far as you can tell?
When I first picked up the Apple iPad and played with it my first reaction was it’s like magic. It works in a way totally unexpected an inexplicable – unlike anything I had ever played with. It was magic.
Of course the “magic” is the result of a lot of hard working programmers – just as the magician’s tricks are the result of many years of practice and cleverness.
When I listen to a new innovation or design and the music is magical do I reflect back on all the hard work and design effort it took to get there or just appreciate the magic for what it is?
Magic is real, never stop believing because then you stop enjoying.
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Soundminded
Magic is the creation of an illusion that something seems to be happening when in fact something entirely different is happening. In our era it is performed entirely for purposes of entertainment. Every aspect of the audience’s perspective is studied and considered to make the illusion as convincing as possible. Those elements that are superfluous are ignored completely, those that are essential must be identified and perfected. Anything else results in wasted effort and/or an imperfect trick. You can even buy books explaining them all including one of my favorites, sawing a woman in half. The saw and the box are mechanisms used to effect the illusion, they are not an end in themselves. They only constitute part of the trick. They are engineered and perfected only to the degree necessary to create the illusion as perfectly as is required to be convincing, nothing further being necessary. Time and resources aren’t wasted on additional improvement, they are spent on other crucial aspects of it. So it is with high fidelity sound recording and reproduction, an attempt to create the illusion of music. It’s not easy, the sense of hearing is in some regards very acute and not easily fooled. It has evolved over billions of years as a primary strategy for survival. Primitive man often heard a threat to his life or potential game to be caught for food before he saw it. He had to be able to make split second judgments about its nature, direction, distance, and the nature of where he was with respect to it (in a cave for example) in case he had to devise escape routes quickly. His ability to analyze sound had evolved equally to his ability to hear sound in the first place.
To create the illusion at least two areas require study, the physics of sound and the psychoacoustics of hearing. The first tells us what the original is about, how it exists to the observer, the second what his brain can and can’t make of it. It is as pointless to create high fidelity audio equipment that reproduces sound beyond the ability of humans to hear as it is to develop photographic equipment that captures light beyond the ability to see (except for scientific purposes not related to normally viewing images.) Overlooking critical aspects of the physics of sound which have not been adequately studied or understood and/or not understanding what elements are critical to the perception of sound and what aren’t results in wasted money and imperfect illusions. IMO that is where the state of the art of this industry is today. That is why I see it as being futile to pursue what some regard as perfection by acquiring the best the current state of the art has to offer. There are other strategies being developed, experimented with. So far none of them have been translated into commercial products. They either don’t work as desired or are too impractical in one way or another. Whether or not that ever changes remains to be seen. But if it does, current equipment will be regarded at that time as primitive, just as we look back at what the technology of the 1930s and 1940s have to offer from today’s perspective.
bfotk
Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”