Erik van Goch -> RE: "Which guitar do I play today???" (Apr. 21 2013 20:37:57)
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ORIGINAL: aeolus A while back British store owners installed a high frequency sound device (18000cycles) to drive off the teens who were harassing (so they said) honest people. An 18 yo can hear up to 18.000 cycles while no one else much older can. They said it was like mosquitoes buzzing but only a teen could hear it.. I was part of a group of music students/teachers that participated in a university study investigating the negative effects of longterm headphone use by musicians. Since i had used headphones a couple of hours a day during the last 10 years i was one of the students selected for there measurements. Those tests involved getting a headphone on your head and telling them when you heared a sound (various volumes/Hz samples were fired). Being scientifically interested and schooled myself i questioned there method in front, arguing the possible negative effect to the ears of longterm use of headphones would be more then compensated by the fact that the test poole probably spend half a lifetime training /doing what they were asking me to do now...listening very intense and with full concentration to a (hard to detect) sound....my whole brain was specialized in performing tasks like this for years (in far less idealistic circumstances then being offered single notes) so what were they expecting, that i would do worse than the baker or the grocer ??? It turned out they had indeed completely underestimated that fact. They did test me nevertheless and concluded that at my midd/late 20ties i had no problem hearing 21.000 Hz. At precent day (just turned 50) i probably will fail to hear 14 kHz. I must add that i owned superb audio equipment (like the Beyerdynamic 990 studio headphone) and never played records extremely heard. According to my teacher of musical theory/history i had "golden ears". My ears tell me that excellent flamenco players like Paco de Lucia, Vicente Amigo, Paco Peña and a couple of others (regularly) play excellent compositions (like la Barrosa) and as performers achieved impeccable taste and nuance.....not the nuance of a classical guitar player who (over)fixates on sound (and treats the massive g string slightly different than the less massive b and e string) but a nuance in melody, harmony, arrangement, sound, dynamics, rhythm, interpretation, (self) expression and communication level with the instrument that (in general) is to subtle/specialized for most classical players to detect (in fact many flamenco players don't detect al these nuances as well and within the restrictions of my personal limitations i learned a lot from spending time with the masters and from studying their records in slow motion over and over again). The mosquito you mentioned funny enough has been replaced by a supposedly more effective deterrent.....classical music :-). Like usual claims like these have to be taken with a lot of salt (not claiming classical music is tasteless off course.....like i said, i have ears). Babies on the other hand seem to benefit from hearing classical music and believe it or not but "life performed classical guitar music" happens to be the first language i ever learned and i love it very very much (although some performers and compositions are total crap, just like in flamenco and in fact every other kind of music). http://www.metafilter.com/117455/Driving-teenagers-away-with-classical-music
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