Somebody said : I can tell the difference but I can't describe it.

[ryanosaur]

Get a grip!

What’s wrong with “chocolaty” and “smooth”.

Great... now I'm craving a shake!

 

[Justdafactsmaam]

This is where good writing comes into play

 

[kemmler3D]

This is where good writing comes into play

I know plenty of good writers who couldn't pin down the sound of MP3 artifacts very well.

I do think that having the vocabulary may, to an extent, actually help you hear artifacts / differences better. If you simply happen to know terminology about frequency ranges, distortion, etc - you also know (at least conceptually) where to direct your attention while listening. You may do a little mental checklist of "bass, mids, treble, frequency response, distortion, IMD, THD..." and direct your attention to try and hear those things.

Just an example, but we know directed attention can affect what you perceive quite a bit. It doesn't make your hearing any better but it can make your brain process the sound differently.

So I think there's something to this idea of a connection between hearing something clearly and being able to describe it.

 

[MattHooper]

It's possible to clearly hear a difference but lack the vocabulary for it. Unless you're deeply into audio you won't have the words to describe pre-ringing or MP3 artifacts, but you may still be able to hear them.

As I pointed out before many times: as a sound designer for film and TV, a lot of my job involves interfacing with clients and trying to understand what they want in terms of particular sound characteristics. This of course, is all expressed in subjective terms - whatever the client can grasp to get across the gist of what they want in the sound, what they are hearing that they like and why, and how they might want to sound different.

While some clients are aware of certain terms of craft, certain shorthand we use, most are not. So it simply involves regular old human communication through language, putting together descriptive words, appealing to analogies or other similar experiences and sounds, etc.

Some preset jargon or professional terminology is not required to make this happen. You can get by on the standard creativity of human language.

Not surprisingly, this works. After all we humans been doing this, communicating information many thousands of years.

 

[Justdafactsmaam]

As I pointed out before many times: as a sound designer for film and TV, a lot of my job involves interfacing with clients and trying to understand what they want in terms of particular sound characteristics. This of course, is all expressed in subjective terms - whatever the client can grasp to get across the gist of what they want in the sound, what they are hearing that they like and why, and how they might want to sound different.

While some clients are aware of certain terms of craft, certain shorthand we use, most are not. So it simply involves regular old human communication through language, putting together descriptive words, appealing to analogies or other similar experiences and sounds, etc.

Some preset jargon or professional terminology is not required to make this happen. You can get by on the standard creativity of human language.

Not surprisingly, this works. After all we humans been doing this, communicating information many thousands of years.

My all time favorite note. “Can you make it 20% more mysterious?”

 

[MattHooper]

My all time favorite note. “Can you make it 20% more mysterious?”

Ha! The funny thing is sometimes we have to take even a comment like that and make it work!

One of my favourite anecdotes on this theme:
I used to work in a building with a whole bunch of other sound editors. There were some goofing around. It was back in the days of fax. One guy was working on a TV movie western. More of a drama.

As a joke, a couple of the other sound editors sent a fax to him that looks like it was coming from the producers in LA. The request on the fax was to enhance the drama of the show by making the sounds of the animals reflect what is happening on screen. so if they’re at the barn and there is sadness in the scene “ please have the cows reflect that, with more sad, sounding cows.” Likewise, if the scene was happier in tone, “ please have the sound of the cows reflect that happier tone of the scene.”

I’ll never forget to look on his face as he walked out of his room that fax dangling in his hand, a look of bewilderment on his face.
Asking me if I had any tracks of “happy” or “sad” cows he could borrow. “ I just don’t know how I’m gonna do this….”

“ happy cow” became one of our running gag catchphrases from then on.

 

[mhardy6647]

My all time favorite note. “Can you make it 20% more mysterious?”

That's so wrong.
A group such as this august body (i.e, ASR) knows the request should have been "Can you make it 2.1 dB more mysterious?"