Listening for Musicality

Yet another type of listening session I do when reviewing audio equipment. Musicality doesn’t actually refer to music sounding ‘pleasant’ when playing over your audio system, like a lot of listeners assume.

Rather, the musicality aspect of performance is related to an audio system’s performance on the basic elements of music. 

How close does an audio system or component come to presenting recorded music within the sound & emotional ‘error bars’ of live music.

Is it in the ballpark in terms of timbral realism (the unique ‘voices’ of instruments)? Can you distinguish the resolution of tone color (the ability to distinctly hear the chordal variations resulting from adding additional pitches to three tone triads)? Do melodies (the tune you ‘whistle while you work’) sound convincing? Does the harmony (treble & bass accompaniments to the melody) sound about right? What about the rhythm (the steady beat that determines the tempo)? Does the tempo (speed) sound as it should? How about the dynamics (variations in loudness)? Are all the dynamic gradations for a piece of music present? Does the audio system have the ability to play naturally at live-like levels appropriate to a piece of music? 

Keep in mind, as I mentioned earlier, that albums can vary all over the place in their recording and mastering quality, and that can affect your perceptions of what your audio system is doing. 

Listening To The Different Eras Of The Recording Arts

I’ve really had a lot of fun with this type of listening session over the last few years.

We are really fortunate that we living in a time that we can listen to albums from all the eras of the recording arts: the acoustic era (1877 to 1925), the electrical era (1925 to 1945), the monaural & stereo magnetic eras (1945 to 1957, and 1958 to 1975, respectively), and the digital era (1975–present). 

There are a vast number of important recordings of artists and musical performances in all of these eras of the recording arts, and it can be a true joy to listen to what Planet Earth’s Canon of Recorded music has to offer. 

When listening to acoustic era recordings I relish the incredible musical performances that are available, from artists that have been long lost to us. It feels like time travel hearing them perform again. 

I also ponder how the recording engineers accomplished such remarkable feats of recording in a purely mechanical fashion. I note certain aspects of the era of recording like the limited bandwidth, the noisier media, and I wonder how in spite of that many of those primitive early recordings can still deliver more emotive power while listening than many of the best recordings from the magnetic era. 

When I want to get in touch with my geek side, I listen to how far back into the room I can hear in an acoustic recording, and how many musicians can I identify around the recording horn. I think about what the visuospatial imaging is like for the musicians all clustered around a recording horn in a room. How does the musicality vary from acoustic electric, magnetic, and digital era recordings?

Sometimes I’ll listen topically to just one of the eras, and ponder the history of that time. Who were the artists that were popular? What were the musicians lives like? What kind of clothes did they wear? Did they make any money playing music? What kind of virtues and vices did they have? What was the recording industry like? What equipment did they have available to play music with, to make recordings with?

Other times I’ll listen to a representative piece of music from the acoustic era, followed by one from the electric era, followed by one from the monaural magnetic era, followed by one from the stereo magnetic era, and end with one from the digital era. 

I’ll listen for how the nature of the recording quality changed over the eras. I’ll listen for how the musicality changed over the eras. I’ll ask myself how the emotive impact changed over the eras. What do I hear in the recording arts when we went from monaural to stereo in the magnetic era? 

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