Conference napalm::commusic_v1

    Yes, I'm sure that aural fatigue could be your problem. I experience
    it after a loud concert - things don't sound quite the same, and
    if I go to a very quite place I notice that my ears are ringing.
    I'm sure that a lawnmower plus a walkman is quite loud...
    
    Peter M
    

    millions of deaf rock and rollers....including me.....I've always
    known that I was getting damage. I get it at work, I get it at play
    I get it when I play....such is life. I'm certainly not going to
    forsake music for my ears.
    
    dave

    
    	I was about to start a similar note (mind if we share this
    one?).
    
    	Aside from volume (and there is a danger here, be careful),
    there is the matter of actual aural fatigue.  I doubt it is
    dangerous, but is bothersome.  Mostly I experience it when carefully
    listening for long periods of time (especially when creating new
    sounds/patches).
    
    	Say you want to make an english horn patch.  You tweak this
    and change that, and it sounds better, and more tweaking, and
    listening, and after a while I can no longer tell whether I'm
    making the sound better or worse.
    
    	Sort of like eye strain.  At that point I usually have to 
    take a break.  After a break, things become clear again.
    
    	I should point out that this is at completely reasonable
    volume levels.  Conversation levels.
    
    	Like Dave's mix problem, I have also had the experience of
    ending the evening happy with a sound only to return the next
    day to discover that the sound is nothing like I remembered.
    
    	Anyone else experienced this?  Any ideas as to the actual
    cause?  Physical?  Mental?
    							- Karl
    
    any progress

    
    As in .5, I have noticed a qualitative difference in sounds during
    a refractory period.  Worse than that, I have written clever pieces,
    saying to myself that "this is the best thing I have ever written",
    only to play them back 12 hours later and not be able to even find
    the beat.
    
    I think we carry some context with us, molded by immediate experience,
    emotional state of mind, chemical substances, etc. We compose and
    hear things in this implicit context, and when the context changes,
    the structure necessary for previous appreciation has dissipated.
    
    The solution for a composer is, of course, to build the requisite
    context yourself.
    
    David
    

    	Last night I spent about an hour trying to copy the brass patch
    that intros ELP's Touch and Go.  It was getting late so I shut down
    with what I considered my best try.  About fiftenn minutes later
    my wife got home and I wanted her to hear what I came up with. 
    So I powered up and we both listened to one of the worst excuses
    for brass that I've ever heard.  Embarassing....
    
    
    	Dan

    All of these effects are real.  The ear accommodates (that's the
    neurological term), like all the rest of our sensory systems.  Any
    repetitive input (and continuous is a special case of repetitive)
    will invoke accommodation.  Apparent volume decreases after exposure
    to moderate to high volumes.  Apparent "brightness" decreases after
    exposure to bright sounds.  Etc.  Some of this happens in the sensors,
    some of it happens downstream in the brain.  It's like the dripping
    faucet that you don't hear until it stops.  Your nervous system
    "tunes out" anything that isn't "new and different".
    
    Just like looking at extremely bright lights can damage your eyes,
    listening to extremely loud sounds can damage your ears.  Tom's
    right, if slightly hysterical.
    
    Listening to a lawnmower for an hour will make your ears useless for
    mixing.  You will get volume accommodation, and your hearing of
    EQ effects will be totally bogus.  You wouldn't want to make important
    color choices after staring at a red visual field for an hour, would
    you?  Everything you chose would be red, because you couldn't see
    red anymore.
    
    Most people listen to music far too loudly for my tastes.
    I ALWAYS wear earplugs (Flents ear stopples, good for about 30 db
    of reduction) when I go to a live rock concert.  I often wore earplugs
    during gigs.  This not only protected my ears, it made it possible
    to hear things in the ambient sound that otherwise so overloaded
    my ears as to just be an undifferentiable jumble.  When I was playing
    regularly I used to have my ears checked every six months.  The
    earplugs worked - no measurable hearing loss over the past 20 years.
    
    I believe hearing loss on the part of performers, sound men and
    audiences is responsible for the overly "hot" mixes (i.e., far too
    much high end) common to pop concerts.
    
    When I want detail, I put on headphones rather than turn the volume
    up.  Headphones get rid of ambient noise, so you don't need to turn
    levels up.

I have experienced this when creating drum patterns, synth patches and stereo
mix-downs.  It is called "lack of perspective".  I usually get depressed if
I listen to one of my mixes immediately after playing my favourite record.
Otherwise, it sounds OK.  Everything is relative.  When spending hours at
a time doing the same thing, your criteria often changes mid-stream without
you realising it.  The problem, of course, is "was it ever good"?  I've
done patches that sound terrible a week later, and yet I also remember
them being better at the early stages than at the stage I left them in.
I can't exactly get the early stages back to verify whether it was ever
a good patch to begin with or whether my perspective was simply off.

The key is to play your material for lots of different people with
different tastes and different backgrounds (as I have), and do the
same thing with synth patches (such as by sharing them in this NOTERS
file).  We are our own worst judges, because we are the only ones who
know what we're TRYING to achieve.  A week later, we may have forgotten
so we hear it with a different perspective.  Someone else never knew
to begin with, so has an even better perspective.

Variety is the spice of life.  If you don't like it, change it.


				Mark

When mowing the lawn (or using the weed-trimmer, which is worse)
I always wear ear protectors.  These are available at any hardware
store.  I got mine at Sears.  They completely cover the ears and
greatly attenuate high frequencies.

They make the mower so soft that I am able to listen to the radio
while mowing.  I use those little stick-in-your-ear earphones, which
fit under the protectors ok.  With the protectors blocking most of the
engine noise, I am able to listen at normal levels.

But usually I only listen to news.  Speech comes thru ok.  The subtleties
of music still get lost in the mud.

Radio aside, you can still hear speech THROUGH the protectors, as
they do not attenuate low frequencies so much.

    
    I get the same thing after mixing records for 4 or 5 hours. I can
    concentrate on the 4/4 beat ok but my ears are too tired to hear
    the music. I think it's mostly mental, but standing up for this
    duration doesn't help either.
    
    CdH
    
    

    
    	Chimmie thought it was the Low IQ that caused people to listen
    to loud rock.  The present hypothesis seems to be that its the loud
    rock that makes people deaf.  Lack of response to sound has been
    mistaken many times for lack of response by the intellect.  Lots
    of us do things that we enjoy and take the risk of injury, OK.
    
    	Reg
    
    (Suffering from a four way busted shoulder from last night's enjoyment)
    

    
    
    WHAT???  DID SOMEBODY SAY SOMETHING???  Must've had my walkman up
    too loud... :^>

    re; .12
    
    	Slam dancing again, eh?

    re: .3
    I play my "Pretenders" CD real loud because that's what the inner
    sleeve says to do. That first tune, "Precious" wouldn't sound the
    same below 105 db! 8^)
    
    Peter "Not me, baby, I'm too precious..."
    

    > This is why I skipped the jam.
    
    Thank god! For a moment I thought you didn't like doing Madonna
    covers!
    
    Edd

    Levels at the MIDIjam never approached typical rock band levels.
    The acoustic cymbals I was using were probably the loudest source;
    in a typical rock band situation they would have been inaudible
    in the overall din.
    
    Levels near a full orchestra doing something like the Mahler 2nd
    approach 110 dba.  But that's ok, it's only rock music that makes
    you deaf.

    You wouldn't have liked tha jam anyway Tom, the rhythms reflected
    the arrested development of rock drummers, it was all that dumb
    4/4 with chord changes on the downbeat.  It made me so stupid I
    turned the wrong way going home and got lost for a moment.  But
    between the six of us, we had enough smarts left to figure out how
    to turn around.

    len.
    

    I want a copy of the Jam tape so I can find the "Born in the USA"
    improv and listen to it at 120db.
    
    Harpo.
    

    A related tidbit of info for rock concert-goers and people with
    obnoxiously loud band-mates or jam partners:
    
    *DO* *NOT* take three aspirin before jams like I used to.  I recently
    read in "Mix" magazine that being under the influence of aspirin
    accelerates permanent hearing damage from high S.P.L.'s by something
    like 10:1.  
    
    Has anyone else heard anything of this phenomena ?
    
    						-Jeff
    

    I went to a durg seminar when I was in the navy and remember that
    aspirin ALL BY ITSELF causes hearing loss, minor to be sure but
    massive or long term dosages of aspirin causes measurrable hearing
    loss...that's why after a lengthy use of aspirin your ears ring....
                                                         
    not that I'm sure this was true.......but they said it was
    
    dave

	I was at the elton john concert this past friday and about
    15 minutes into the show this $%^&*%@#$u468$%%% young woman sat
    down right next to me and proceeded to go....
    
    	WHOOOO AWRITE WHOOOOOOOO AWRITE WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
    	WHOOOOOOOOOOOO AWRITE WHOOOOOOOOO WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
    	AWRITE WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
    
    	she was so buy whoooing and awriteing that she had no idea
    who was playing or what they were playing.
    	the music was fine.
    	she was giving me a headache.
    	right in my damned ear.
    	finally, the person in front of her went and got the management
    and the management said we could could all kick her and bite her
    and stomp on her face and we did. it was great fun.
    	the concert was very good , too.
    
    	why do people go to concerts (at 18 buck s a shot) and do that?
    
    	rik
    

    ... because they are young and ignorant.
    
    They should not be kicked and bitten. They should be subjected to
    obnoxious noise until they beg....
    
    Edd

    All salicylates (salycilates?) (e.g., aspirin, PeptoBismol, etc.)
    will cause Tinnitus (ringing in the ears) at high or chronic dosages.
    Don't know about the synergistic damage effect though.
    
    len.
    

    I was once prescribed a new painkiller in the salycilate (sp?) family.
    I don't remember what it was called, but the pills were hexagonal.
    Anyway, I am prone to tinnitus (at low frequencies as well as high) and
    when I took this stuff my ears rang for two months!  I saw an
    audiologist who told me this was a bad side effect of this drug,
    which has since been pulled off the market (it had a bad habit of killing
    people).
    
    I guess Tylonal would have been safer.  But then again...
    
    John M.

    RE: noisy concert goers
    
    They should be subjected to loud obnoxious noise something like
    38 hours of "Itsy bitsy, little teeney yellow pokadot bikini" at
    110db......