Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome, I'm speaking from inside Chario Rehearsal Room
This is a very special room. It was designed with the purpose to gather infos about acoustic energy associated with live performing sources and to better understand pro&cons of standard recording techniques.
Within these walls all performers are allowed to play easy listening one to each other without interferences and surrounded by a smooth acoustical field and I'm going to show you why
When a musician receives a correct sound information he/she plays at the best. In this case any perceived variation is within 3dB SPL and this is an outstanding achievement.
Well, all these things are of paramount importance if you wish to fully understand what is happening before acoustical energy reaches the mic capsule. Then we use that knowledge amount to better understand the role our loudspeaker systems play during reproduction.
Our design process takes into account electrodynamic and electroacoustic principles of course but also room acoustics because this last one highly weighs among the many disturbing factors the listener is aware of.
not mentioning our mind processing during a musical performance.
This Rehearsal Room has been designed by Mario Marcello Murace who is Chario Loudspeakers R&D engineer. He took care of stationary waves which give rise to the ping pong effect of that part of energy which is trapped between two parallel rigid surfaces, for instance side walls or floor-ceiling. The perceived sensation is a boomy room with some annoying tails accompanying each acoustic event.
Let's take a look at the ceiling.there are dumped acoustical canvas covering the overall surface in order to break any face-to-face reflection on vertical axis.
What does it mean? The acoustic energy hitting the ceiling and the floor won't build up a steady flux between these two surfaces instead it will be spread around in a random manner following some useful paths in order to exploit it, avoiding dangerous effects.
This is a very important thing for energy control and managing. A further control comes from side walls whose absorption can be varied by means of reacting surfaces exposure whose bulk is an added parameter for better low frequency control.
Again, these two apparently reversed multicell horns are an intriguing structure. They are about two meters in height and look wide.
They have been conceived to convey the incoming wavefront at very low frequencies keeping under strict control the whole air volume within the room
If you measure the surface of your listening room an multiply it by the height you'll have the total volume of resonating air mass
It is virtually impossibile to avoid this trouble in ordinary rooms but here we have our reversed horns that take care of very low frequency resonance leaving the performers without any offending chaotic acoustic field.
so that performers aren't aware of annoying information hence letting them perceiving at the best all musical events. As I previously said all these matters increase Chario Psychoacoustics Lab knowledge upon the role the speakers will have during your listening sessions in your listening environment
We already know any domestic environment shows some troubles from acoustical point of view. We push our skillness toward further horizons trying to make systems such as Academy Serendipity...Academy Sovran...or Constellation Ursa Major...that are able to cope with ordinary room's physical limitation.
limiting the damage to listener's perception because this is our philosophy since almost 40 years...
the same philosophy that suggests us to look for a domestic listening experience that could be maximally free from loudspeaker own biasing.
Of course we'd like you to know that we are still not able to work miracles, but surely we succeed in lowering to maximum extent room's troubles.
That's why our loudspeaker systems fit any random environment because a few of us have the chance to live in a music-only dedicated room.
such as a room that can be modified following acoustical criteria. So we are mostly forced to cultivate our passion within any ordinary small closed space being it a living room...sometimes a bed room or anything else...
Then the target still remains any acoustical damage limitation making things right so as we can perceive an original message free from system interpretation... as it is at the audio chain origin.
We feel this is the kernel of the matter. The artist....I mean the orchestra conductor should be the only music maker not the hardware....
For instance if we are listening to "The Fantastic Symphony" conducted by Boulez or Furtwangler we recognize there are perceptible differences between them such as time duration... measure beat... phrases linking....
All these things have their own meaning and it has to be right so. The orchestra conductor, the singer, the musical ensemble, the combo, the big band and whatever you want....are requested to do it because this is the "inner essence" of any artistic event.
Someone is making music by means of his/her interpretation of original works from Beethoven...Wagner...Berlioz....but why not from Beatles....Pink Floyd....Rolling Stones....
The conductor, the single artist, the singer are all allowed to give original piece a personal mark, something to be recognized at once....On the other side we at Chario Loudspeakers are never allowed to give reproduction our own interpretation.
Ehy, listen...this is Chario's sound! Not at all, this is a foolish thing!...Chario must perform free from any added elementî leaving the artistic content to the performer....
Here it is our leading philosophy, a real feature of our brand since forty years....
Doubtless making music within this kind of rehearsal room where an outstanding acoustics is the final target allows me and the other guys to hear any detail coming from our instruments.
This state of affairs enhances the performer's creativeness to the point you grasp all nuances of what you are playing...There is no more the discomfort of hearing your instrument only or to the opposite you hear all the other music lines but not yours! You try to reach any kind of equilibrium turning your amp volume up....but it is only garbage.
I have no need for my dedicated monitor. I catch the overall sound I details. Yes, we use amps but sound is always crystal clear...the corrected acoustics make you feel good and so you can express yourself at best.
Playing within a rehearsal room with this kind of smooth and homogeneous response gives you the added advantage of easiness of listening to all other surrounding sources but above all the pleasure to hear your voice in a very distinct manner...and this is a feature absolutely uncommon!....
No need for usual strange equalization...non need to increasingly turn volume knobs up to catch all musical lines....everything is easier....I can say it is really a "plus" for such a rehearsal room.
Indeed, you can stay and play everywhere inside the room having the same sound quality perception....for all the instruments around you. This unique feature gives you the chance to better perform freely....because you never waste time and energy trying to understand what's is going on all around.
it's truly a pleasure to play within this room.....Yes, very nice indeed!
Well, after the interesting interview with Carlo Vicenzetto we moved to the research laboratory where Mario Marcello Murace (Head of R&D - Psychoacoustics Lab) is going to explain what is behind the scenes. Chario Rehearsal Room: could you tell us how is it done?..When was it born? Why did you designed it?
Thank you, I state I'm reluctant giving interviews because I'm an engineer and you know engineers are useless for marketing and communication purposes because they are sterile, boring and they always wear white coats...
It's true but you aren't wearing any white coat and anyway your words are necessary to understand the all topics.
Yes, but an engineer's speech is something like omeopathic medicines, they do well if taken in very small doses...
Our rehearsal room is an extension of this laboratory. In designing it I didn't make use of any glasswool, eggs containers or polyurethane baffles which are materials normally used to achieve a standard room response taking into account the reverberation time only. This is known as classic approach and I mean "classic" in the truest sense of the word because the acoustical control concept was born during 16th and 17th century with the great european theatres. That time the main target to be achieved was: voice intelligibility and loudness.
You mean the classic approach is overcome...
No, it's not the case...this design approach is far from wrong...indeed the actual problem arises from the "size scaling" from large venues to small rooms. If you are mostly interested to noise control from and toward outdoor, well you face no troubles. Vice versa accounts donít add up if you want to control musical information.
What's the reason?
The large sizes of concert halls keep any source on stage at a great distance away from boundaries. Energy content alteration due to early reflections from side walls and ceiling will follow the direct acoustical arrive after a large time delay. ( For your knowledge direct acoustical arrive is meant to be the acoustical ray traced from source to listenerís head along optical line)
Scaled sizes of ordinary living rooms change both the "effect" and the "weight" of reflections perception which hit the listener's head after a very small time delay.
So we can say the physical effect is different in quality..
Correct, the acoustical event takes on a different aspect and the related sound sensation gives rise to a totally different emotional elicitation. It is another thing...We perceive acoustical sources within a small sized room as a complex matter much more difficult to "understand" than any other similar event taking place in auditoria or outdoor. Standard recognition criteria are no more valid. We can say it with a formally rigorous expression: Ergodic Theorem doesn't hold anymore....
A very strange word...any help to better understand?
No help at all...otherwise we act as boring engineers in white coats...If there is someone interested to go deep inside the matter can browse the web with Google search... I say it again...Ergodic Theorem which stops to be valid for small sized confined spaces such as living rooms...offices... small warehouses...small conference rooms and so on...but letís get back to the main topic.
Standard procedure suggests the engineer to firstly search for optimal room parameters and only then putting any acoustical source inside. In other words the fundamental hypothesis doesn't take into account any kind of source and this is formally correct because you soon realize it would be a nonsense processing data for a single violin and then facing a big mess if there were "also" a cello or a piano.... So it's absolutely correct to conceive room acoustics independently from sources...
All right, may be it's correct...but accounts don't add up!
Well, accounts never add up because music is a kind of acoustical event apart from any other and PC simulations are rather far away from reality. In the presence of a musical event our auditory system takes advantage of...how can I say...an "additional baggage" of information intruding into the psychological sphere. Because data processing is concerned with physical quantities only...our simulation models are narrow.
How can the problem be solved?
You know...solving the problem is a bit challenging, I would simply say that over 30 years of research have convinced me about some "primitive truths", (statements which cannot be demonstrated called postulates) such that there exists in our brain a perception process we can activate at different consciousness levels in order to understand the incoming message.
For instance?
Let's suppose the window is open and a motorcycle is hurtling down the street breaking our interview with a deafening noise. Your ear-brain system immediately switch on a perception scheme made of processing blocks distributed over a time period. Now, because the motorcycle acoustic vibration is troublesome...your brain will not fully activate and after a few processing blocks it stops.... waiting for the motorcycle to move away.
Conversely...you are at the bar sipping a cup of coffee and you suddenly hear the notes of your preferred tune...whoops! Your ear-brain system starts as previously, but this time it has recognized a different stimulus structure. Your sensorial and emotional response will be also different and the processing blocks time sequence could be theoretically...infinite...to the point that the succession : Stimulus identification" sensorial elicitation " emotional growth ...goes on even though there is no more coffee in your cup, and you remain with your raised elbow showing a poor clever facial expression...
More than anything else it's the poor clever facial expression I'm worried about...
Ah! Ah!...this is why I don't drink coffee at the bar...
Now you have to know that these processing blocks are in all respects "information packages" enclosed among finite time intervals, each one of them with its " value of interpretation ". Time intervals have a very short duration of the order of thousandth of a second and are known with the term of "time windows".
Time windows...?
Yes, time windows...
Now I ask you a question: during a musical performance do the musicians undergo this kind of perception by means of time windows?
Well..Aristotle would say "Yes..." If we are men and we are subject to that and musicians are men...
In your opinion can a musician make a distinction between noise information and musical (semantic) information?
Yes...may be not all of them...but the answer is "Yes"...
Let's take into account non-european classical music, I mean Jazz...Folk...Pop...R&B....We know it mostly relies upon electroacoustic reinforcement systems (guitar, bass, voice, keyboards...). For this reason "loudness" (aka listening volume) could become a wild variable, so it's mandatory to take it under strict control to ensure a comfortable listening.
Undoubtly...
And you soon realize the potential mess growing up when all acoustic sources (i.e. musical instruments) are switched on...
It happens very often...
The first thing to do is to benefit from classical approach to control the quantity of energy within the room, using necessary structures and dedicated materials to abate boomy effects and acoustic tails...
I do agree...
In order for each performer to exploit the maximum available quantity of information we need "order & law" in the rehearsal room, so avoiding chaotic acoustic fields. Unfortunately there is a contraddiction between reality and our intuition because any "order increase" implies a consequent "disorder reduction". Physics teach us that the more the disorder the more the possibilities for a system to evolve toward a different status, we could say : there is more information with disorder than with order. There are leading scientists saying that children's rooms ( which is by definition the image of disorder) should remain "as they are" because we could gather more info about our sons & daughters state of mind...
Ah! Ah! ....I believe physicists should consult mothers before attempting any conclusion of that kind...
I could agree with you, nonetheless their viewpoint is right. If we look at our children's room we are confused by the lack of any order shape to which we are long accustomed. We feel there is a lack of "ethics and dignity" because we are used to think in a structured manner by cultural and educational training...First is A...than comes B...after that comes C...following an established cause/effect pattern...We are really astonished and a little afraid of the unlimited possibility to "think everything" in whatever order...also making unlikely & hazardous concatenations of thoughts...
It's clear and simple, so what do we do?Do we leave human settlements in a mess state?....
No, we can do another thing a lot more fun...we can ride the paradox! We face a contraddiction because of "causal" effects (deterministic ) vs. "casual" effects (stochastic) these last ones being unpredictable. Suppose Peter Pan's small statue is on the shelf behind the frog-shaped clock and both items are closed inside a plexiglass box...No doubts, if I want to play with Peter Pan's I have to start up my mind with a "deterministic (causal) process" making a fixed sequence of actions in order to take the small statue. If on the other hand all object are spread every where I don't undergo fixed rules...(apart from the difficulty to immediately find out the small statue). The interesting thing is that all available objects are "contemporarily present" under my eyes. So, how much connections (synapses) can I conceive other than the starting one?
I don't want to deal with numbers now...but it's surely an enormous figure..
Then, why should I give up to creativity coming out through disorder in favour of an "ethic order"? And to the opposite...why should I give up to security coming out through an ethic ( I mean social) order in favour of a more creative yet problematic disorder?
It's a personal matter, we make our choices essentially following our nature.
You are right, but we should give something up anyway. It seems that creativity & security are opposite one to each other...aut aut...this or that...A or B...and we fall again in the dualistic logic (dichotomy) which prevents us from using all the toys in the children's room at the same time!...Now please answer this question: a jazz performer whose "essence" is improvisation is closer to creativity or closer to security?
I think if he/she is really good at playing and is sure not to make mistakes...well, no doubts creativity is preferred, he/she lets the feelings out..
So, the "security matter" should have been previously solved..
I think so...
All right...the drummer's duty is to keep the band together, the real musical glue...He/she has to be sure of his/her self to inspire security to the rest of the ensemble... It seems that in the presence of a musical event the previous paradox fades away...no more the choice between A and B but the co-existence of A and B. The only difference is that in this case creativity & security are not addressed to a single man/woman...but rather to the members of a band. But every musician knows that when playing together with other guys/girls the whole ensemble acts as a unique "thinking being"... a unique body...a unique intention...a unique voice...so that there is no logic error in considering a band as it were a single performer to whom the paradox is inefficient...
It's a definitely original point of view that can lead many people to confusion...anyway I don't see any logic error. A band is practically a single performer with more souls....
So I asked myself how to provide a band with the creativity & security "couple" during performance within a small sized room...
Finally, we got to the point...
Let's get back to our time windows...they are essentially "pieces of time continuum" . They contain (with a good approximation) the "auditory cues" our brain needs to recognize an acoustic event, in the same way you realized the difference between the motorcycle and the tune. In the first example once your mind is aware of the stimulus nature it stops processing after a few time cycles. During a musical stimulus time cycles keep on going at least till the music end. But if the listener is also the performer then he/she needs two things: hearing him/her self and hearing other performers...There are a thousand ways for a musician to "hear" surrounding cues...but only one (or a very few others) is the best to convey more information. This added information doesn't come out from disorder, indeed it is the by-product of multiple ordered time windows, which trigger the sensation of security necessary to break "the order"... so entering into the creativity space...which I define as a useful chaos where everything is ready to happen at any instant without deterministic sequence.
It's really astonishing!...But let me know how it works...
Just leaving the classic designing approach in the frequency domain and join the new approach in the time domain. There was a building with an available room in the basement. So I firstly took into account the native geometry and strategically put each source all around. Then I asked my PC to compute the best relative positions among sources to obtain the correct "time windowed energy" in order to recognize and localize each of them with the minimum error. Thus the place of the drums cannot be taken by the bass....the place of the brass section cannot be taken by the singer....and so on. Each source is simulated by its "polar diagram" which in turn defines the way the radiated wavefronts will reach other sources, how much time will they take and the available energy density. Far from common sense... the unitary directivity factor (aka omnidirectional polar diagram is not a desired feature of an acoustical source also for loudspeakers! (astounded?). It is the combined effect of directivity plus acoustical path that allows for maximum information in presence of increased order. Surely, this is a paradox... if you don't think in the time domain...
Great!...Now, let me attempt to draw some conclusions about this "off the rails" interview...
Go for it!...The ending is all yours because I've spoken too much! But you know, oversimplifying some basic concepts and making Chario Rehearsal Room the same way as a standard one... would have been an injustice to Chario Loudspeakers reliability.
Let me try...The tale you told us can be summarized so: there is a young boy/girl who is an early growing musician. He/she is in his/her room looking at musical scores (some pieces of them) spread on the floor mingled with all other things normally present in an " information-full" children's room... The musician is free to choose the "score sequence" in a totally free manner (creativity). In order to achieve that goal he/she has to "move" within the small space to have an eye on each of the pieces of paper... His/her father is a physicist and loves disorder very much...I mean all those things that could evolve into infinite shapes (system's status)... The musicianís mother is happily married to the physicist but she has a classic education, so that she is free from a "primordial soup" world vision... Well, as the young musician plays (improvising music patterns sequences), she gets busy "making order" within the room. She removes with and "ordered sequence" all obstacles (noise) from the musician's path in order for him/her not to take eyes off the scores...
Itís a perfect image of physical reality...
This way, we are able to give an explanation for the "apparent paradox" of maximum information with maximum order... Itís only possibile if we think of the two concepts as linked together by means of ordered time windows. Within these "time interval splices" both mother & son/daughter do their own job..at the same time!
Well said! Next time I'll do the journalist and you the engineer...
Thank you Mario for this outstanding interview