Sound Engineering: Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right?

[ardnog]

Apologies if wrong forum. Could not see anything about acoustics. Is this mathematics?

Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right? Digitised instruments and voice changers don't always sound right.

I had a chance to visit a recording studio. Was given a lengthly talk about sound from a sound engineers point of view, and things like timbre, that we don't can't do properly yet on a computer, so that they can't make a proper male<-->female voice changer, or plugin that makes an electric instrument sound like an acoustic etc. Though, they can get close for certain instruments to the point where the majority of professionals are fooled.

 

[hutchphd]

To my mind one must be careful so separate the questions of recording (and reproducing) sound from that of synthesis of sound (like the voice changer).
In principal, given sufficient bandwidth, there is no reason the that digital sound reproduction cannot exhibit arbitrary fidelity. (Gnashing of teeth from analog aficionados). The synthesis part is much more problematic and requires a very large set of actively changing parameters. For instance, try to synthesize Miles Davis.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Summary:: Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right? Digitised instruments and voice changers don't always sound right.

Apologies if wrong forum. Could not see anything about acoustics. Is this mathematics?

Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right? Digitised instruments and voice changers don't always sound right.

I had a chance to visit a recording studio. Was given a lengthly talk about sound from a sound engineers point of view, and things like timbre, that we don't can't do properly yet on a computer, so that they can't make a proper male<-->female voice changer, or plugin that makes an electric instrument sound like an acoustic etc. Though, they can get close for certain instruments to the point where the majority of professionals are fooled.

Timbre is a qualitative measure of the entire emitted audio signal; and even worse (from a modeling perspective) is that timbre can change over time (for example, the sound of a cymbal) because the relationships between individual frequencies that comprise the audio signal are not fixed in amplitude or phase as time progresses.

White noise is perfectly random- that can be simulated to some extent.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right?

You could start by trying to define timbre in term of measurable quantities. Not so easy.

 

[anorlunda]

Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right?

Don't forget to define what you mean by good timbre and bad.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Don't forget to define what you mean by good timbre and bad.

that wasn't my statement ("Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right?"), please don't attribute it to me.

 

[anorlunda]

that wasn't my statement ("Why's it so hard to get things like timbre right?"), please don't attribute it to me.

Sorry, that was intended for the OP.

 

[ardnog]

I suspect she was using the sound engineers definintion of timbre. It was explained to me as what makes a piano and guitar sound different even though they're playing the same note, and the same for a male and female voice. Likely there are many different things that contribute that make it hard to synthesise, but I'm surprised the machine learning people haven't managed it either.

 

[tech99]

The MP3 standard throws away some (or most) of the information, so we would not expect the reproduced sound wave to look the same as the original. And to trained ears, why should it not sound different?