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Hi all,
I wanted to let you all know about a new website I've just setup as part of my university dissertation technology project. The main idea behind it is looking at audio critically and analytically in an aesthetic way. What that means is that we may listen to some tracks and think that sounds 'raw' or 'dirty' or 'clean', but what do these words really mean? My website aims to find out what we mean by these words and how we might go about pinning down what technical characteristics of a descriptive word are actually used.
The reason I post here in the first place is that I need people to fill out a couple of very quick surveys related to audio. They're completely anonymous, will take the amount of time it takes to listen to one track of audio and you'd be helping me and the musical community by contributing.
I'd greatly appreciate anyones help or assistance on this project so please don't hesitate to ask or post here with any questions you might have!

Cheers guys!
Chris Wray

http://www.criticalsound.co.uk

Comments

Jeemy Fri, 01/08/2010 - 10:50

I really like this, and have submitted a form. Everybody is going to have different ideas as to what the objective criteria should be, and it would be intruiging to know on what basis you suggested the terms you did. I presume you've looked at the varios graphs and charts that show audio frequencies and how they relate to standard terms - 'dark' air' 'presence' 'bite' etc?

From the 2 minutes I spent on this, it looks like an excellent project. I'm sure we'd all be interested to see the results when you collate them.

WaltzMastering Fri, 03/05/2010 - 05:34

Christov, post: 297454 wrote: Hi all,
The main idea behind it is looking at audio critically and analytically in an aesthetic way. What that means is that we may listen to some tracks and think that sounds 'raw' or 'dirty' or 'clean', but what do these words really mean?

Imho, It would be very hard to define a subjective word. Take a word like "color"... to me color means distortion.

There are many shades of color. One person's color might be another person's transparent. Say if clean is transparent and dirty is color. Where do they intersect? It's a sliding scale that everyone has their own unique interpretation of.

Anyway, it will good to see what you come up with.