If you are a musician or audio engineer, it is very important to know what decibels are. Unfortunately, decibels are extremely confusing. For one thing, there are so many different kinds of decibels! You only care about two of them: the decibels you see on a noise meter, and the decibels you see on a …
Tag Archives: noise pollution
Teaching dynamics and loudness
When I cover dynamics and loudness in music theory class, I only spend a small part of the time talking about forte/piano, crescendo/diminuendo and so on. Once you have the Italian translations, those terms are self-explanatory. They are also frustratingly subjective, and they refer only to unamplified acoustic music. To understand dynamics in the present …
Sound writing with my New School students
I just completed the first week of Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School. We began the semester with critical listening. Before having the students analyze recorded music, I had them warm up by doing some writing about the sound of a mundane environment. As it turns out, New School students are terrific and …
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