Is our perception of "warm" tone a product of environmental psychological conditioning

Alright hear me out, I’ll be as brief as the topic allows.

Warm tone in regard to sound engineering and recording is often defined with fairly unquantifiable terms. For the layman, terms like soft, pillowy, blanketed, full, classic, “not sharp”, natural, tube, analog, etc. are all mostly reaching for something which evades a technical understanding of the building blocks that compose sound. Those words don’t necessarily match a sound designer’s description of what makes up the space which is considered sonically “warm” but is somehow universally understood enough to be debated ad infinite.

A lot of what we reference for this impression of warm, is the music, television, and film we grew up with. For those who grew up in the 70’s / 80’s / 90’s, much of what we sonically experienced first or secondhand in regard to the recording technology of the 50’s / 60’s / 70’s / 80’s was created on gear that is now mostly considered “warm” sounding, with some having been collectively elected as “better” sounding than others.

So, the stage is set, we think of these older forms of media as sounding warm, not digital, but the sound engineers in the 1940’s / 1950’s weren’t thinking warm, they were thinking about getting the “best” recording possible, which to them meant a clear and as lifelike as possible reproduction of the sound being recorded. The 1960’s saw expanded use of recording as a sound medium, but still their model was influenced by their direct predecessors, in that even with sounds that are intentionally saturated or distorted, “a professional, good recording, sounds clear, lifelike and nuanced.”

So, things continue to develop and then here we are in a digital era where warmth has become a very specific let’s call it “pocket” of sound design, and the perception of that pocket, involves something of a hierarchal system of identifying how warm it is. If you said “neve console” someone thinks warm, if you said “digital recorder” mostly that same person does not think warm, and yes, there’s a lot of ground in between.

Our perception of warmth is then based on sounds created on or emulating gear and recording techniques used by engineers who were limited by the technology, and were often more concerned with getting a good recording, so why is our perception of it warm? Does warm really mean slightly muffled, or exponential tube harmonics, or sonically limited or whatever some classic recordings actually are when compared against a modern digital wave?

Isn’t it possible that we define this psychological effect of nostalgia as something “warm” therefore this entire perception of warm tone is sort of an unintentional cultural brainwashing? Classic recordings of the past are always going to be classic, but is our attachment to them and therefore the “warm” sound, purely psychological with no other merit? I guess warm tone exists if we understand it to exist, and can define it enough to intentionally create it, but what makes people use the term warm in regard to sound engineering and recording as opposed to some other adjective?

When I googled looking for information to support this discussion, rather than finding firsthand accountings of prior generation recording engineers talking about what they were trying to accomplish in this regard (you often find description of technical details but without any mention of sensory words), mostly you’ll find modern online conjecture and people talking about what “the masters” were going for, or speculating on how they got their tones. So attached to that, if anyone can cite any reference to “analog engineers of the past” looking for a “warm” tone and disprove any of this, that would also be interesting, but mostly I am somewhat convinced that the association of the word warm with an unlike sensation of hearing, almost certainly has a psychological connotation in the same way that some people say seeing a baby duck, or nostalgia, makes them feel “warm”.

Anyways, that’s all I got. I hope someone made it through all of this and is still awake enough to have an opinion!

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I think the vast majority of musical ideas are structured in our minds and not anything objective. It’s only the western musical mindset that makes minor key songs sad and major key songs happy. More to your point, “warmth” in sound design can be a useful construct since so many people seem to share an idea of what it means, but it is still an artificial idea, and nothing objective about any sound :slightly_smiling_face:

My two cents, anyway

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For me, I feel like this is more fundamental than geographical.

Perhaps not so much with songs as a whole, but definitely individual chords.

A minor chord just IS sadder than a major. In much the same way as a fifth interval and an augmented feel different.

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Octatrack is warm, cooks with olive oil and a pinch of brown sugar. DT is warm, cooks with salty margarine, instead of animal fat :robot:

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To be clear, when I said western, I was speaking about cultural boundaries and not geographic ones.

It’s a rather pervasive thought so I can understand why you feel that way. I don’t claim to be certain, but my inkling is that our positive feelings associated with major keys and chords are borne all the way out of the middle ages or further back. The main objective difference between major and minor is that major chords are more consonant than minor chords. It’s easy to see where consonance is associated more positively than dissonance. But I don’t believe those are innate associations, I do believe they are learned.

There have been a few studies among people who had limited exposure to Western music, but this subject is extremely difficult to study in a controlled and objective way. Here’s one I found:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18635

But you can absolutely find other studies with different conclusions.
As I said, it’s really my opinion, but I don’t think major and minor being happy and sad is objective or innate to people, I just think it’s something easily associated and that a large part of the world agrees on because of how pervasive it is.

Mine is a garbage disposal that takes in my overcooked scraps and turns it into mush

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No two people mean the same when they say “warm”.

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warm is a direction to help focus something extremely abstract, all types of perception are fundamentally internal and therefore subjective, it’s not just warm but “warm” is a recognizable phenomenon in recording and sound.

there’s no distinction between whether cold or warm is a less psychologically ingrained term, but in regard to 2 people, if one person after hearing a tone, asks another person what kind of sound this is and that person replies “warm”, then there are 2 people who will at least temporarily align on what the meaning of warm is.

Outside of that is a range of interpretation and exists within the “pocket” of warm tones, as most people won’t describe the sound of the machinedrum or fm bell sounds as warm, but most people would say a juno or moog farts have a warm sound to them.

there’s a difficulty of finding a way to talk about the bigger topic inside the scope of a more narrowed viewfinder.

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To me “warm” in audio terms equals a rolled off high end in combination with higher-order even harmonics, and slightly boosted/rounded low end that doesn’t go too low. YMMV.

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I wonder if it also has some link to glowing hot tubes?

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I think it’s about evolution. Warm is calmness perhaps and more about the sounds around you on a simple dailybasis. And anything that is not warm is kind of warning, danger perhaps alarming. So I am going to go with this theory that it’s hardwired into our genes. If we had evolved in a constantly noisy and stormy planet, maybe we would think a nice lush pad would be alarming. Who knows.

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that’s an interesting take. I’ve read that people can relate to cartoons because our memory (with the exception of eidetic memory) is often full of loose images, rough edges and fuzzy details, therefore when we see something with less lines than reality but that still resembles reality, it sparks recognition in the brain.

so maybe the fuzzy, haziness of memory is part of “warm”, and we’re somehow drawn to an in utero (vaguely safe), slightly muffled, peaceful type of sensation which we then imprint onto sounds.

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thinking about this has me jumping to ideas of soft acoustic guitar riffs, emotionally played piano, a pitch warbly analog synth pad blanket. so i guess to me the concept of warm is kind of about a natural-ish sound and then more about the feeling but thats getting more heady.

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Sure, agreed, but these two are of course closely linked.

Personally, I think they are innate on some level.

Perhaps because of mathematical relationships, and because those relationships (or similar) relate not only to music, but also to the universe, how it has developed, physics, chemistry, and biology, evolution, and so on.

I haven’t read anything about it though, and it’s quite possible I’m talking shit :grin:

And almost certainly I went off topic, or at least at a tangent to it!

Interesting thought. Reminds me of this building which was thought to be haunted, most visitors to the building had a feeling of unease and it was well reported despite no apparent “spookyness” to the building.

Turned out there was a frequency being emitted by a generator in the basement, or a fan bearing, I can’t remember which, that when replaced instantly lifted the “haunted” feeling from the building. I think the frequency was either subsonic or infrasonic, but it was out side of standard hearing ranges.

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I think of warm audio as a bit like wabisabi it’s got a definition kind of but it’s a collection of many elements that come together in a way that makes a thing that way. It could be missing some of those elements and still be that way and it also could have all those elements and not be that way.

I think there is a fair amount of modern synth wave that technically has all the elements but just misses it somehow.

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Octatrack with some of my beats exactly

Ask yourself why were those particular words chosen? Because they fit. Nobody first called tube analog “cold and sterile” because it isn’t. When digital came along nobody called it “warm and tubey” because it wasn’t.

Cultural conditioning is itself downstream from basic human perceptions, it doesn’t just reflect what happened, it reflects what people liked and thought worth remembering.

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It’s an agreed upon illusion just like any other component of reality.

It’s something we perceive, and like to be able to describe to one another so we all know what each other is talking about.

Pushing it into those audiophile style minutiae conversations is where issues arise.

Like with anything, there is the thing we’re talking about and generally agree on, and then there’s a version that’s taken to such extremes that it becomes a joke or meme at some point.

:wink:

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Slightly off-topic but I just started to read on evolution of hearing, especially if there is any benefit of hearing certain frequencies. Here is a free to read paper. Just Google it. And enjoy your day/night.

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