![]() ![]() So then at university I learned all the cool underlying maths and science and I was lucky to do one of the only masters programs in the world that focused on, essentially, the science and data of music.Īll that is to say: I am definitely biased! I love this stuff. There was some way of looking at music that made it *all about* frequencies. It wasn’t just that a sound wave had one frequency which was how fast it vibrates the air. I remember spending lots of time fiddling with the EQ settings in Winamp to make my music sound better, and looking at the cool visualisations my computer could show based on the frequencies in the music – and I kind of got the idea that there were a *lot* of frequencies in music. I did catch glimpses of why this stuff was cool earlier on. And then when I did my masters we really went deep into music specifically and this scientific view on what’s happening in a musical sound.Īctually, that’s a lie. But I don’t think it was until I got to university and studied physics and computer science and got into the nitty gritty of frequency domain transformations and fast Fourier Transforms and a bunch of other stuff with intimidating names that I really *got* why frequency was so important for thinking about sound. And I kind of got that sound was about air vibrating and that was a pressure wave and it vibrated at a certain frequency. And I was a geeky kid so that stuff was interesting to me. When I first learned about frequencies it was in the context of a high school science class, talking about waves in water, or a spring or string bouncing and vibrating, or some really abstract stuff about how light works. ![]() But most don’t take the time to really look into this topic – which is a shame because there’s a lot of exciting stuff that can be empowering to you as a musician. In my experience a lot of musicians bump up against this idea of frequencies and often figure out how to do what they need to with the equipment they’re using or wherever it’s come up. Or if you’re an electronic musician or you’ve done some home recording you’ve probably played around with equaliser settings or plugin controls that are set in terms of frequencies. ![]() You might have seen the big mixer desk in a studio or at a live gig where there are various sliders to control different frequencies. ![]() It came up in our interviews with Jeremy Fisher and Allan Hubert Wright talking about how the human voice can do some interesting and unexpected things – and we can explain what’s going on by looking at the frequencies. We mentioned it in our previous episode on Tone when talking about bass and treble, low frequencies and high frequencies. You might have come across frequencies in your musical life in a few places. All music is experienced as sound, and audio *frequencies* are a particular way of analysing, representing and understanding what’s going on in sound. So let’s begin with: why talk about audio frequencies at all on the musicality podcast? Well, the first thing to say is that “audio” is just another word for “sound”. But I will mention at the end a great free resource you can check out if you want to dive in. So I’m going to focus here just on the fundamental “what and why” of learning about frequencies – and leave all of the “how” for now. We could literally do a hundred episodes about audio frequencies and music. This is one of those topics that is far too huge for a short podcast episode to really cover. But that actually proves to be fascinating and quite powerful for a musician – once you get your head around it. Now already we’re sounding quite dry and scientific! And audio frequencies are basically a science-y view on music, and all sound. Today I want to talk about a topic that is baffling to a lot of musicians – so baffling that many don’t even get why they might *want* to understand it. Enjoying Musicality Now? Please support the show by rating and reviewing it! ![]()
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