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

The Lounge General Discussion
21

What sounds “good” is culturally learned, thats why various cultures have their own sets of scales, minor key = sad, stuff like that.

Gamelan always sounds disharmonic and clangorous to me but will sound like a banger for people who grew up with it, same with Chinese folk music and a million other examples.

Collectively we have come up with a vocabulary to describe sound to other musicians, eg warm, bright, tight etc, these are not ambiguous terms but they require a bit of ear training and practise to understand them.

Kinda same with genres, like i can say “this is a deep progressive techno track” and people will have a good understanding, but to some people i might as well be talking bahasa

6 Likes
22

Probably a separate discussion, but does anyone else find that they enjoy the animation styles from their youth, but really struggle to enjoy more modern or significantly older styles?

Back on topic, and I’m not sure this is possible to answer objectively in our global and interconnected age, but it would be interesting to have been able to pose this question in different languages 200 years ago if we had had a similar journey of recording tech as we have had and were having similar debates.

Would different cultures/languages/societies have arrived at similar terms that all essentially meant ‘warm’ or would the metaphors have been entirely different?

And as I’m sure has been said above, maybe audio things weren’t thought of as warm per se, until something came along that was called ‘cold’. We consider early digital to now have its own personality, but perhaps not always so.

Early amp modelling for instance, where it sounds like a guitar amp and then you can add all the fx and at some point it sounds closer to a produced album tone than it does to playing an actual guitar. Almost like the guitar is a gate controller for the CD volume. To me, it’s not that it sounds cold (or even necessarily bad), it’s that it sounds somehow false and unnatural, and that leaves me feeling cold.

1 Like
23

Is the experience of music (and sound), our brains intuitively perceiving certain mathematical relationships and patterns?

A simple example, the dissonance between the root and the minor second, vs the consonance of the root and major third, etc.

And warm tone vs cold, is just a more complex example of our brains picking out certain relationships between harmonics (and other aspects of a sound).

We hear with our brains ultimately.

And our brains are “a product of environmental psychological conditioning”.

So, yes.

1 Like
24

I read this book ages ago it seemed to be reasonable Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination - Jourdain, R, Jourdain, Robert | 9780380782093 | Amazon.com.au | Books (not that ecstasy to be clear).

1 Like
25

The term warm as relates to sound was definitely used in the 80’s, (as was “fat”) for example I remember synths with presets such as “warm pad” or “warm strings” possibly Alpha Juno2 or another Roland of that era.
Also in studios engineers would use the term, I can’t say if it was used any earlier, but I imagine it probably was, maybe in the 70’s too?

1 Like
26

Its not true. I played live in early 80s around UK and Europe, and the warm sound wasnt apparent. It was bad amps speakers etc. Distortion. What you are talking about isnt warmth. Its things slightly out of tune and distorted so they sounded fatter.

As regards Nostalgia. Im not nostalgic for that anymore. Its had its time.

27

counter question - what made you ask about this?
i feel like answers will be meaningless unless you have a direction in mind.
any of the posts above can be a definitive answer to a more narrow question, but what are you looking for @shigginpit ?

also reminds me of Bouba/kiki effect - Wikipedia

2 Likes
28

Warm is a feeling we feel. Very subjective for sound waves. All of our ears are different. I tend to love washy vocals where as all of my friends don’t understand my draw to certain songs. When it comes to synths, a DX7 can sound warm to my earballs…

1 Like
29

a discussion with some of the finest minds that I know. need I be looking for more?

3 Likes
30

It is. Or I would not have stated it. I’m talking about the use of the word, the meaning of the word is (largely) subjective anyway though.

I guess if one were so inclined, a good place to look for early uses of the word would be in the Muzines archives, lots of interviews in those.

3 Likes
31

fleetwood mac rumors released in 1977 combines (for the time) state of the art analog recording, creative recording (mic placement and use of space) and has an arguably “warm” sound, but as the dude darenager aptly puts it, this discussion (and word) is largely subjective.

everyone can absolutely feel, believe, and express those subjective interpretations and I’m interested to read it all, but for the record (regarding rumors) none of it is out of tune, and the amps are all in very fine condition.

1 Like
32

We never talked about it back then so whats the difference? Its a sensory illusion. By distortion and what not.

33

Early Moogs were called “cold” — only later were they considered “warm.”

1 Like
34

‘Warmth’ is very much quantifiable and it constitutes a mixture of harmonic distortion, phase distortion, a bass tilt and limited dynamic range from natural tape compression. On top of these classic traits, I would add the extra factor of tuning instability, tempo instability and ‘human’ feeling from recording with microphones live to tape which add to the received emotional sensation one gets from listening (fixation of the ‘vibe’ in the room at the time of recording). So far as I can tell from reading interviews on muzines.co.uk most engineers were looking to eliminate these things for as long as there has been recorded music, mainly because they were seen as undesirable artifacts of the technological limitations of the time. This attitude probably reached its zenith in the final era of analog studios with recordings such as Scritti Politti’s albums or the record Human by the Human League, which to my ears sound extremely clinical and overworked (digital synths and effects aside). Shortly after this everything started going digital as first preference over less ‘perfect’ media. There’s an interesting interview with Tony Visconti where he touches on these subjects in the context of a time of transition in the studio recording world: Down to Earth (HSR Oct 86). Some of the John Foxx interviews there are also pretty enlightening on the takes of the day: From 24 tracks to 8 (HSR Oct 84).

To finally answer the title question, there is definitely some conditioning from the long exposure to the effects of ‘warm’ sounds giving a kind of baseline experience. But it’s also indicative of an innate preference in human auditory perception, if not we would all be listening to 100% end-to-end digital harmonically correct music yet here we are still tuning everything slightly wrong and loving it.

Studio engineers most definitely did.

10 Likes
35

Warm in its modern conventional audio usage definitely relates to frequency (IMO).

Play a pure sine wav at 65hz (C2) and 4186hz (C8) and ask yourself which sounds warmer?

They are the same wave but different sounds, so pitch is unsurprisingly a component of a given sound.

DonovanDwyer said it above, warm basically means more low frequency and attenuated high frequencies.

“Tape warmth” can be an artifact of the physical media of tape losing its ability to represent higher frequencies as it gets more worn. This would bring a relative emphasis to the lower frequencies in the material (also compression but I will ignore that here for simplicity).

It’s a bit like “dark”, which generally means attenuating the higher frequencies, vs bright, which I would say is typified by more prominent higher frequency content.

I think warmth in a mixing content basically means darker highs, presence in the low end but still with good mid range.

I also think about “color”, where its not like a literal hue, its more like describing differences in representing the same material.

For example, a deadpan FBI agent explaining that birds aren’t real vs the rough looking guy shouting about it to nobody in particularly when you get off the bus. One definitely has more color than the other. Similarly, equipment and processes can have a lot of color or be thought of as relatively clean.

The Nord Lead is a synth I owned which I feel completely lacked any warmth and basically was impossible to impart warmth with post processing. It was cold, hard, cutting and clinical. It sounded wicked with distortion as well but you were never going to get a a lush, warm pad out of it.

Warmth, color, etc arent technical terms with rigorous quantifiable definitions but adopted language that we use to describe things to other people working in the same field, who have similar, learned perspectives.

3 Likes
36

When I made my joke earlier with the OT and the DT it was from a sound engineer perspective, or a casual listener, but I see the musician’s perspective too now. That’s an important distinction.

37

Are we talking late 80s/early 90s? Because literally everyone I knew that was into music production was talking about it back then. CD vs vinyl, ADAT vs reel-to-reel tape, DX7 vs Juno, TR-808 vs Drumtrax etc.

If we’re talking live sound reinforcement and sound systems, they were still largely analog at the time. Clipping and distortion were happening in the analog mixers, compressors, limiters and amplifier stages of a club’s system. So even if the source material was mainly digital, tons of “warmth” was being added.

1 Like