RE: a woman's ears

[Goddess <thefates@concentric.net>]

  From your experience as an engineer, do you find that (in a loose general
sense) men tend to listen to music with more treble than women do?  I had
some male friends who would listen to music with the treble really up there
and at loud volumes.  This simply made me cringe and leave.  This
unfortunately, happened several times until I'd get sick of yelling at them
to turn it down and they'd get sick of hearing me...

smiles,

Corynne

P.S. I'd always ask them how they could deal with it but I never got an
answer, just a surprized questioning "huh?, what's wrong with it?"

At 07:21 PM 3/8/98 -0800, you wrote:
>At 2:05 PM -0800 3/8/98, Laurie Hatch wrote:
>>Invariably, xy's I've played with have been able to handle louder high
>>frequency volumes onstage than I, some by a considerable margin.  (Maybe
>>that's
>>one reason why I'm into bass %^). This doesn't mean I don't like it 
>totally
>>intense and balls to the wall!  Plus, overall I think my musical tastes 
>are
>>usually as out there as anybody's.  So it may well be that, as you 
>suggest
>>Sarajane, in some situations volume can have more to do with discomfort 
>than
>>musical content.  Non-musicians may not necessarily be able to articulate
the
>>difference.
>
>Just so's you know.....As I understand the physiological issue, it's not
>volume or high frequencies that cause the discomfort in women. It's
>particular types of non-harmonic distortion in the audio system, which 
>will
>tend to be worse at higher volume. I've seen several discussions of this 
>in
>audio engineering journals, usually under the context of how to get a 
>wider
>customer base for audio products.
>
>These inharmonic distortions add frequency components to the sound in a
>particular way that women tend to have a negative reaction to while men
>typically don't notice. It is very common with cheap home/audio stereos,
>cheap PA systems, cheap music gear, etc. It also happens in more expensive
>gear that isn't designed very well. As the volume is turned up on these
>systems, the distortions start to happen, and women will start to find it
>unpleasant for physiological reasons. On cleaner systems that don't
>generate these distortions, the discomfort doesn't happen.
>
>This is where the misconceptions that women don't like loud music comes
>from. Some guy with a shoddy $100 car stereo has it turned up to where 
>he's
>got tons of crossover and IMD distortion coming out of his crappy 
>speakers,
>and his girlfriend demands that he turn it down. If he hadn't been such a
>cheapskate and bought a decent stereo in the first place, she would stick
>around longer. (or at least wouldn't complain about the volume...)
>
>Men will also experience this type of discomfort, although it is less
>pronounced and takes longer. If you ever experienced "ear fatigue" while
>mixing or listening to a walkman or something, I think that's it. On a
>better quality audio system, you can last much longer.
>
>It's something to think about when choosing gear. You might save a few
>bucks and alienate half your potential audience in the process. And if you
>are stupid enough to think it's that the women just don't get your music,
>well, you are probably just stupid......
>
>kim
>
>______________________________________________________________________
>Kim Flint                   | Looper's Delight
>kflint@annihilist.com       | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html
>http://www.annihilist.com/  | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com
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