Yesterday, I had planned to create a new YouTube video of myself performing older piano music. In this case, it was the Gnossienne No. 2 from 1890 by French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). I recorded the performance on my console piano, which (regrettably) has required re-tuning for the past fifteen years or so, using the Lexis Audio Editor smartphone application. The following video illustrates my frustration over what I heard after I transferred the audio file into the Audacity freeware music program for editing:
What possessed me to stop the playback of this recording in disgust? The problem, or at least what I heard, stemmed not with the poor sound quality of the flat piano. I took greater issue with how I captured the sound recording with Lexis Audio Editor. I set the recording level at +13 dB in stereophonic mode and placed my smartphone on the fallboard of the piano. This last step proved to be a disaster, because Lexis capture the loud tones of the piano (which also produced "clipping," or an annoying scratching sound) while also silencing the softer tones. Experienced electronic and electroacoustic composers, as well as skilled audio engineers, try their best to avoid clipping and other errors in audio sampling and editing: things like "Quantization Error," which can happen when converting sounds from analog to digital, and "Aliasing," or an aural error that often results in the distorted quality of a given audio file. The cleaner the sound quality of an audio file, the better.
For those who are curious, here is a YouTube link that should clarify what I have said: bit.ly/2UGPcZ5
For those who are curious, here is a YouTube link that should clarify what I have said: bit.ly/2UGPcZ5
RSS Feed
