MIxology 3: Perception and Reality - Posted on 2017-06-25 by Christian Voegler

My mentor, Hollis Greathouse, and I had another interesting discussion while mixes were bouncing the other day.  The band that I've sat in on more sessions with than any other during the course of this program has tracked all of their songs and is now in the mixing phase.  Of the songs they recorded, one was a cover of an old 1940s blues song. One of the lyrics talked about sending a letter via air mail, something which at the time was considered fairly new and innovative.  Here we are, seventy-some years later, paying tribute to the artists' work by re-recording their song using modern techonology.  I couldn't help but think about The Chainsmokers' "Selfie", their novelty hit from a few years ago (that arguably nonetheless put them in the superstar position they're in now, but that's another story).  The technology to take a picture of oneself with a cell phone and post it to the internet for the world to see (sometimes more advisable than others) is fairly new and innovative as well, and yet when I told Hollis about the song he lamented the "disposability" of modern music, popular culture, and society in general.  But then I said how maybe it's not that we've become a disposable society, but that we've become so cynical and take things for granted so much we don't appreciate that we've evolved to a point that we can just throw things away without much consequence.  Up until that point Hollis had been gently rocking in his chair, but when he heard that he stopped, cocked his head to the side a bit, and said, "That...IS interesting.  Huh."

I went on to talk about how back in high school, I didn't really pay much attention to music (I was a late bloomer).  My German teacher used to play Grateful Dead and Van Halen songs between classes, and one of the songs I heard was the latter's "Little Guitars".  Recently I decided to look up the song on YouTube to see how it differed from what I remembered, and it turned out it did - immensely.  I thought it had been a slower song with heavily overdriven guitars, but in reality the song is faster and the guitar parts are relatively clean.  But it wasn't just that I remembered it wrong; this was how I heard it.  I asked rhetorically that since I didn't have as much musical context then as I do now, it affected my perception of it at the time.

There is some truth to the old adage that "perception is reality".  Toyota continues to sell cars on their reputation for quality and relability, even though recent statistics seem to indicate that might not always be the case.

I guess this doesn't have a whole lot to do with audio engineering, but I thought it was worth telling people about...