His master's voice
April 24, 2010 12:48 AM Subscribe
What, besides the volume, distinguishes the sound ("timbre") of a string quartet and chamber orchestra? Put another way, if I took a recording of myself singing, and overlaid 100 copies of the track on top of each other, would I sound like a choir section?
Best answer: When people play or sing in unison, there are still differences. They will be very slightly different in pitch, leading to odd beat frequencies, and even if they were miraculously exactly in tune, they would be out of phase (that is, the peaks and troughs of the sound waves they produced would not co-incide) and even if they were in phase, the waves the produced would not have identical shape.
So if you were watching on an oscilloscope, VERY COMPLICATED results would appear even if they were all playing just one simple tone.
More than that, your ear is doing some weird approximating shit so you hear the average pitch. This, supposedly, is why Berlioz liked motherfucking huge giganto-orchestras -- better apparent intonation.
With strings in particular, note that classical players are trained to use vibrato on sustained notes. In a string quartet, each player's vibrato is perceptible. In a chamber orchestra, it obviously isn't directly perceptible -- you can't hear the individual wobbles in pitch any more because in each section, different players' wobbles are overlaid and obscure each other -- but it leads to a sense of "warmth" or "thickness".
So your best bet in approximating a choir is to shift your overlaid copies a microsecond or two in time and some fraction of a tone in pitch, perhaps stretching or shrinking by some imperceptible but meaningful proportion. But you still won't get the same effect as actual different performers with different sound-producing apparatuses.
(It'll be close though.)
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:51 AM on April 24, 2010 [2 favorites]
So if you were watching on an oscilloscope, VERY COMPLICATED results would appear even if they were all playing just one simple tone.
More than that, your ear is doing some weird approximating shit so you hear the average pitch. This, supposedly, is why Berlioz liked motherfucking huge giganto-orchestras -- better apparent intonation.
With strings in particular, note that classical players are trained to use vibrato on sustained notes. In a string quartet, each player's vibrato is perceptible. In a chamber orchestra, it obviously isn't directly perceptible -- you can't hear the individual wobbles in pitch any more because in each section, different players' wobbles are overlaid and obscure each other -- but it leads to a sense of "warmth" or "thickness".
So your best bet in approximating a choir is to shift your overlaid copies a microsecond or two in time and some fraction of a tone in pitch, perhaps stretching or shrinking by some imperceptible but meaningful proportion. But you still won't get the same effect as actual different performers with different sound-producing apparatuses.
(It'll be close though.)
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:51 AM on April 24, 2010 [2 favorites]
If you overlaid 100 exact copies of the same track, it would sound identical to and indistinguishable from the solo version, except for being louder. Obviously in real life this is impossible to achieve because there will always be variations in pitch and tempo and the waveforms will never exactly match which is why the sound is fuller and not just louder.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:21 AM on April 24, 2010
posted by Rhomboid at 3:21 AM on April 24, 2010
Best answer: (And obviously this should not be confused with the practice of overdubbing, where you record the same musician playing the same track multiple times and overlay them to add depth and texture -- in that case the tracks are not identical and you get the natural human variations.)
posted by Rhomboid at 3:31 AM on April 24, 2010
posted by Rhomboid at 3:31 AM on April 24, 2010
If you want to sound like a 100 voice choir, you will need to make 100 separate recordings and overlay them. It's the differences between the voices that make a choir sound like a choir.
posted by flabdablet at 4:42 AM on April 24, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 4:42 AM on April 24, 2010 [1 favorite]
Put another way, if I took a recording of myself singing, and overlaid 100 copies of the track on top of each other, would I sound like a choir section?
When people play or sing in unison, there are still differences.
Yes, and there's also the fact that a choir doesn't usually sing in unison. They harmonize. And they have men and women. Their voices sound different.
posted by Jaltcoh at 4:56 AM on April 24, 2010
When people play or sing in unison, there are still differences.
Yes, and there's also the fact that a choir doesn't usually sing in unison. They harmonize. And they have men and women. Their voices sound different.
posted by Jaltcoh at 4:56 AM on April 24, 2010
Best answer: Ever hear of ADT? That's artificial double-tracking, and it was created by George Martin, IIRC, because John Lennon didn't like having to sing his vocals twice. A singer's recorded voice is duplicated but as noted above it has to be slightly out of phase for the "doubling" to be apparent. It's like duplicating an image: if the two are precisely superimposed, you can't tell there are two. One has to be shifted slightly up or down or left or what-have-you.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 6:43 AM on April 24, 2010
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 6:43 AM on April 24, 2010
On top of the factors above, each singer in a choir is located in a slightly different place in space. This isn't something you can simulate using panning; you really need to run each vocal track through a psychoacoustic simulation that lets you place it in a virtual space.
Or you could do it in a real space. I seem to remember hearing that Pete Townshend of the Who once set up a bunch of speakers on stage in a concert hall, ran multiple tracks of guitar and synthesizer through them, in order to make it sound like an orchestra. Of course, it is expensive.
posted by kindall at 7:48 AM on April 24, 2010
Or you could do it in a real space. I seem to remember hearing that Pete Townshend of the Who once set up a bunch of speakers on stage in a concert hall, ran multiple tracks of guitar and synthesizer through them, in order to make it sound like an orchestra. Of course, it is expensive.
posted by kindall at 7:48 AM on April 24, 2010
without attempting to lay down choir knowledge I don't possess... keep in mind choirs are often comprised of people in different vocal ranges, Soprano/Alto/Tenor/Bass (SATB). Also within each range, each person's voice apparatus is still slightly different, leading to a slightly different timbre (sound colour). Timbre is why a cello sounds different from a trumpet even though they're playing the same note. Notes aren't just frequencies but bundles of harmonics (formants) - as a spectrometer would demonstrate. So 100x your own voice, even if overdubbed, still wouldn't be the same (but yes, close).
posted by yoHighness at 8:15 AM on April 24, 2010
posted by yoHighness at 8:15 AM on April 24, 2010
What really gives an instrument it's timbre is how it amplifies certain notes in it's overtone series. If you recorded yourself singing the same part over and over, the combined signal would amplify the overtones in your voice and the result would begin to sound less and less like a human voice and more like a bunch of noisy notes (the strongest overtones dominating to the point of obscuring all else). There was a classic recording of just such an experiment that I cannot recall at this moment, but maybe someone else is familiar with it...
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 9:44 AM on April 24, 2010
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 9:44 AM on April 24, 2010
Do you mean I Am Sitting In a Room? Although that is about bringing out the overtones of the room...
posted by yoHighness at 3:11 AM on May 3, 2010
posted by yoHighness at 3:11 AM on May 3, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
-Chamber orchestra is also laid out in space. You get sound interference from the different point sources, for each seat in the auditorium, due to differing delay paths from each instrument to each seat. 4 instruments on the stage have less of this kind of interference, and would sound drier, less "body", if you will--even if the quartet was hypothetically pumped up to an equivalent volume.
-Much bigger effect is the coordination between players. Pick out some music with different transcriptions. A really good example is La Valse. Maurice Ravel, the composer, single-handedly wrote different versions for solo piano, for piano 4-hands, for duo-piano (my favorite version), and for orchestra. The thing to notice is that the more performers you add (and the farther apart they have to sit), the slower the maximum speed they can play at. Any faster and the music will get very sloshy--it gets much harder to keep time. Personally, this is the reason that I find chamber music to be not only more intimate but more intense. Everything is executed faster, musical events are sharp and clear compared to the big sound, big music of a large ensemble.
posted by polymodus at 1:31 AM on April 24, 2010 [3 favorites]