Sound Quality

The chapter takes a closer look at sonic concepts and the relevant major strands of research in the cognitive sciences. The chapter explores the ways in which the cognitive processing of sound is a multimodal task that extends into the world via language, technology, and actions. The main source of information in this study consists of cognitive metaphors reflected in written accounts, but the chapter also outlines nonlinguistic realizations of sound quality such as visual metaphors (e.g., graphical user interfaces) and enacted metaphors (e.g., bodily actions). The transition from analog mixing boards to digital ones that maintain the actions and look of the first-generation models is explored in the context of the SIGNAL FLOW metaphor. Finally, the schematic function of force metaphors in sound production is covered.

Introduction

The introduction outlines key discourses of sound through an examination of music reviews, recording technology advertisements, and sound engineering literature. Listening is theorized both from the perspective of production (evaluating and imagining music and sound in the process of shaping it) and from the perspective of reception (reviews and user discussions). A quality-oriented mode of listening is outlined, and it is argued that music listening is, for the most part, characterized by a certain aesthetic attitude toward sound, even when music listening is strongly connected to, for instance, social identification and everyday activities.

The Ontology of Recorded Sound

The chapter begins with a discussion of the role of the metaphor in the formation of sound’s ontology by situating metaphorical descriptions of sound within a discussion of existing definitions of sound found in various musicological and philosophical works. The chapter shows that different ontological metaphors govern how we make sense of sound in the act of listening and how they are used as cognitive tools with which to do certain things with sound during music production. It is argued that people conceive of the general existence of sound via metaphors and that music listening and music production involve attending to sounds at different ontological levels simultaneously.

Conceptualizing Sound Quality

The chapter consists of an encyclopedia that lists, describes, and assesses metaphors that often are used to describe sound quality. Each entry explains the embodied cognitive patterns that connect sound descriptors with the listening experience. Each entry also discusses related terms, and each term is examined in relation to its metaphorical use and the discourses underlying sound and music communities. The encyclopedia includes 15 pairs of opposing terms: balance/unbalance, big/small, clean/dirty, clear/blurred, dark/bright, fat/thin, full/hollow, heavy/light, open/closed, organic/synthetic, rough/smooth, soft/hard, tight/loose, warm/cold, and wet/dry. The terms are distilled from a 50-million-word collection of texts concerning sound culled by the author from music reviews, hi-fi magazines, and the sound engineering literature.

Discourses of Recorded Sound

The chapter looks at descriptions of sound across texts and across historical contexts. Starting from the invention of the phonograph through multitrack recording to digital audio, the chapter accounts for change and stability in the way sound quality is processed in relation to discourses of sound. It shows how listeners, the industry, and other communities build specific listening preferences through the discourse of sound quality. The chapter also addresses the contributions of the phonograph, vinyl disc, cassette tape, CD, and MP3 formats to the discourse of sound, and it enumerates two cognitive metaphors, the ONE REALITY type and the MULTIPLE REALITIES type.