Audio Production and Critical Listening: Technical Ear Training develops your critical and expert listening skills, enabling you to listen to audio like an award-winning engineer.

Featuring an accessible writing style, this revised edition includes substantial new content on parametric equalization and tonal balance, spatial audio and reverberation, dynamics processing, distortion and noise, analysis of sound recordings, as well as updated sections on headphone recommendations, hearing conservation, and new everyday ear training exercises. The interactive web browser-based technical ear training software modules provide endless opportunities to practice identifying various types of signal processing and manipulations across a range of difficulties. Working alongside the clear and detailed explanations in the book, this software completes the learning package that will help you train your ears to listen and really “hear” the technical details of your recordings through each stage of production and post-production. This all-new edition has been updated to include access to integrated software that promotes listening skills development through audio examples found in actual recording and production work, suggestions for progressive equalizer training exercises, and new analyses of recordings examples in a range of diverse genres.

This is an ideal textbook for undergraduate students in music production, audio engineering, and sound design courses, as well as novice producers and engineers honing their critical listening skills for audio.

Preface to the Third Edition

I am delighted that you have decided to invest time and energy to improve your critical listening skills. And I am honored that you have chosen this book and the accompanying software to help you on your journey of auditory discovery and training. In this book, we will discuss a range of different listening exercises, strategies to maximize progress using the accompanying technical ear training software, and relevant topics in audio theory and auditory perception. My overarching goals with this book are to help you develop and increase your critical listening skills for audio and to provide tools for ongoing technical ear training.

In this third edition of Audio Production and Critical Listening: Technical Ear Training

I have revised and expanded many sections throughout the book to improve clarity and explain key concepts more effectively. I have also added new material not included in the first two editions. Since the publication of the second edition, I have continued to explore new ways of developing critical listening skills, and this edition includes additional exercises and approaches to technical ear training.

Outline of the Book

I organized the book around common audio processing tools. We will look at audio attributes and their associated audio signal processing devices, including:

• Timbre or tonal balance: parametric equalization and filtering

• Spatial attributes: reverberation, early reflections, delay, and panning

• Dynamic range control: compression/limiting and expansion/gating

• Signal degradation: distortion and noise

• Amplitude envelope and audio excerpt cut-off points: source-destination editing

In Chapter 1, we look at technical ear training and analytic listening, and their importance to audio engineers. I outline some goals, introduce some listening exercises, and provide relevant information about loudspeakers and headphones. Because the sense of hearing is crucial to our work as audio engineers, I include some information on sound levels and hearing health, and end with some suggestions of things we can do to protect our hearing.

In Chapter 2, I focus on spectral or tonal balance and how it relates to parametric equalization. Spectral balance is the relative level of various frequency bands within the full audio band, across the range of human hearing, ideally from 20 to 20,000 Hz. This chapter also describes the equalization ear training software module and outlines a progression of quiz parameter settings in increasing levels of difficulty.

Chapter 3 focuses primarily on reverberation, and it also covers panning, channel correlation and stereo image width, delay, and comb filters. The reverberation ear training module is described.

The chapter ends with a section on mid-side processing and ways that this tool can be used in ear training.

Dynamics processing is used widely in most audio recording and live sound situations, with the exception of classical music for the most part. Compression, limiting, expansion, and gating all offer means to control dynamic range and modify timbre in unique and time-varying ways. Dynamic range compression may be one of the most difficult types of processing for a beginning engineer to learn how to hear and use. In many dynamics processing algorithms or circuits, the controllable parameters are interrelated, which affects how we use and hear them. Chapter 4 discusses dynamic processing and offers practice exercises on hearing artifacts produced by these different effects.

We can apply distortion intentionally to a recording as an effect such as with electric guitars or a vocal, but there are many situations where we want to avoid unintentional distortion such as that from an overloaded gain or input stage of an audio interface. Chapter 5 explores a few types of distortion, such as clipping, overdrive, bit rate reduction and perceptual encoding, as well as artifacts like extraneous acoustic or electronic noise, clicks, pops, buzz, and hum.

Chapter 6 focuses on audio excerpt cut-off points and introduces a type of ear training practice based on an audio editing technique. Listening for edit and cut-off points at the millisecond level can sharpen our critical listening skills. The accompanying software module mimics the process of finding an edit point by comparing the end point of one clip with the end point of a second clip of identical music.

Chapter 7 covers analysis techniques for recorded sound. Although there are established traditions in the theoretical analysis of music, there is no standardized method of analyzing recordings from a timbral, sound quality, spatial image, aesthetic, or technical point of view. This chapter discusses methods for analyzing musical recordings and provides some examples of analysis of commercially available recordings. We also discuss listening bias and ways that we can make the listening process more objective.

The book assumes that readers have completed some undergraduate-level study in sound recording theory and practice, and understand basic audio theory topics such as sound basics, decibels, equalization, dynamics, frequency response, microphones, and microphone techniques.

Throughout the book, I have included listening exercises, some of which can be done at any time or location and some of which require the use of reasonably capable headphones or loudspeakers in a relatively quiet listening environment.

This book builds on the work of other audio researchers, teachers, and practitioners with the goal to provide readers with methods to develop critical listening skills applicable to audio engineering. The first formal course in technical ear training that I am aware of began in 1977 at what was then called the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music, now called the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, in Warsaw, Poland. Pioneering work by Andrzej Rabowski, Tomasz Letowski, and Krzysztof Szlifirski resulted in a course they called “Timbre Solfège” which was offered as part of their sound engineering curriculum. Publications by Letowski (1985), Letowski and Miskiewicz (2013), and Miskiewicz (1992), for example, describe this innovative and ground-breaking work that remains essential to the education of sound engineers. My work has also been highly influenced by work that René Quesnel did at McGill University, some of which is described in Quesnel (1996). I had the great fortune to study with Professor Quesnel during my graduate studies and learned an immense amount about technical ear training from him. Sean Olive’s work at Harman International, some of which is described in Olive (1994), has also been influential to my work.

The Accompanying Software

While it is essential to learn about technical ear training strategies and associated audio theory through this book and other sources, critical listening skills are not developed without practice. To provide the reader with opportunities for focused listening practice, I have made technical ear training software modules available via the companion website https://webtet.net. I describe each practice module in more detail in the subsequent chapters. Practice modules are interactive, which means you can adjust parameters of each type of processing and get immediate auditory feedback. This way of working mimics what happens in audio production work. The software offers ear training exercises such as matching and absolute identification of processing parameters. Some of the modules provide sound processing examples only, such as the mid-side module, without specific question-and-answer exercises. Being able to isolate a specific type of processing allows us to learn the effect that it has on different audio signals. I encourage you to use the software to chart your own technical ear training path while focusing on those areas that are most needed at your stage of development.

You will need audio recordings for practice and training. I suggest some specific sound recordings later in the book, but there are other locations to obtain useful sound samples for focusing on different types of processing. Single instrument samples and stem mixes can be downloaded from many web sites, such as:

• https://freesound.org

• www.telefunken-elektroakustik.com/multitracks

• www.cambridge-mt.com/ms/mtk

• https://samples.landr.com/category/free

• www.musicradar.com/news/tech/free-music-samples-royalty-free-loops-hits-and-multis-to-download-sampleradar

Digital audio workstations such as Ableton Live, Apple Logic Pro, Apple GarageBand, FL Studio, PreSonus Studio One Pro, Reason, Steinberg Cubase, and Universal Audio Luna include libraries of instrument sounds and loops that can serve as sound sources in the software practice modules.

This book is the result of decades of work as a recording engineer and university professor.

Each time I teach my technical ear training course at the University of Michigan, I learn a bit more about the various ways students learn the material and develop their skills, and I reflect on the best ways to help students gain these crucial abilities. I also continue to deepen my own critical listening skills. Based on students’ questions, feedback, and the difficulty or ease with which they complete each stage of the course, I try to find ways to improve my teaching so that they learn more deeply and more effectively. I have also tried to think about my own learning and development process. How does one develop critical listening skills? How do we progress from easy to more challenging exercises in a logical way?

Even after we have developed a solid base in critical listening, we can continue technical ear training indefinitely through formal technical ear training exercises, while working on audio recording projects, and with everyday acoustic sounds. My hope is that I can impart methods for gaining critical and analytical listening skills for audio. In writing this book, I want to help you not only listen more deeply but also think more about what you hear, so that through the combined process of active listening and thinking, you can sharpen your auditory focus and give you more facility with critical listening.

Before we head into Chapter 1, I want to offer some words of encouragement. Assuming normal hearing, as determined by an audiologist, most people should be able to improve their critical listening skills through technical ear training. Renowned recording and mixing engineers—that is, the “Golden Ears”—are exceptional not because they have super-human hearing but because they have practiced listening day in and day out, year after year. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to gain critical listening skills. It takes great effort and energy to listen intently and actively, and to think about what we are hearing, but the effort pays off in better recordings and mixes, and an ability to work faster and more accurately. This book and accompanying software offer methods, strategies, suggestions, things to think about, exercises, theory, and practical tips to help you develop much-needed critical listening skills for work in audio. Anyone can turn knobs on a mixer or adjust plugin parameters. The difficult part is to hear the effect each parameter has on a project, to know what needs to be done in each situation to best support an artist, and to select the audio processing parameters needed for each situation. In short, we need to practice regularly with focused exercises, pay attention to and think about what we hear, and always listen actively to improve our critical listening skills.