Opinion

Those who pay attention to the field have been amazed and encouraged by advancements in audio design – not merely in improvements in playback gear, but in the capture, storage, transmission, and retrieval of recordings. It’s astounding how far we have come since the early days of primitive radio and shellac records. All of this is due to engineers working fanatically to extract the last few drops of sonic detail and dynamics.

And therein lurks a problem. Engineers push technical limits, but their focus on technical perfection – if such a thing is even possible – can ignore the fact that music is an emotional art form. Like their scientific cousins, engineers tend toward emotional detachment as a professional necessity. Objectivity comes first.

Mood music

Many advancements in audio have been the result of anecdotal evidence – improvements noted by designers and their colleagues, including technical experts and music industry professionals. Ordinary music lovers have been left out of the development cycle. This is a huge obstacle for any further advancement in audio reproduction, because it ignores human emotional response in favour of technical specifications.

Emotional response to music has been studied by researchers such as cognitive scientist Daniel Levitin, whose book This Is Your Brain On Music has sold millions of copies. A McGill University professor, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a musician, record producer, and former governing board member of the Grammy Awards, Levitin is probably the foremost expert on the subject, now psychiatrist/neuroscientist Oliver Sacks has passed.

But it’s safe to say that musicians, songwriters, and composers also have plenty of innate organic knowledge about music and emotional response. How else do they know that certain chords and melodies evoke joy while others do the opposite? How do they know that one bassline sounds mournful while another makes us want to get up and dance?

To my knowledge there’s been scant research about emotional effects induced by the various audio technologies that are perpetual topics of argument among audiophiles – sample/bit rates, amplifier topologies, loudspeaker design, etc.

Listen and learn

One small study was conducted years ago by physiologist Scott McPhee and J. Craig Oxford, the founder of Nashville-based speaker marque High Emotion Audio. Oxford also worked closely with filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett [pictured above], whose award-winning 2014 documentary Alive Inside explored the value of music therapy for dementia patients.

McPhee’s study tracked physiological markers among listeners hearing two different sets of loudspeakers – basically trying to quantify the ‘goosebump effect’ – and convinced Oxford that much of what we assume about audio is wrong. Technical testing of a loudspeaker will reveal much about its decay time, for example, but nothing about how that speaker affects listeners.

Oxford asserts that attack speed triggers the brain’s limbic system and the fight-or-flight phenomenon. This is an evolutionary development to aid survival, as is the way our hearing is most sensitive around 3kHz, so we can be alerted by a mother’s voice or a snapping twig.

What the audio and music industries need most for the next great leap forward isn’t another listening panel of ‘golden ears’ or agreement on a new twist in signal processing. We need largescale, peer-reviewed, double-blind, corroborated studies quantifying emotional effects on listeners. Ask test subjects not which technology sounds better, but which one feels better.