Comments on Profile Post by E_Schaaf

I was comparing some foam earpads today. Two different earpad shapes, and within each shape, two different foam materials. Each earpad sounded distinctly different in timbre even when measurements and total airflow were not drastically different. Coarse, slightly more stiff foams had a granier, hashier sound. Squishier, finer-cell foams had a softer, warmer sound.

Leather earpads have a silky, supple surface texture and tend to have more of a sense of gloss to the highs. Suede pads tend to feel dry to the hands, and have a sense of sonic matte-ness. Foam dampers can sound a whole range of ways, and distinctly different from the feel and sound of paper, felt, or nylon mesh dampers.

Even though there's an enormous amount of interplay with the more mechanically active and rigid parts of a design, each material does have its own sense of timbre even when applied across different drivers and enclosures.

Maybe it's obvious, but material science is a huge part of acoustics. It's fun to experience it in an embodied way instead of simply reading lists of numbers about a material's properties more abstractly.

You can airflow-impedance match various dampers for a very tight FR match, maybe a dB margin of error here and there, but still have a totally different sense of texture and space. Perhaps seeing miniscule differences in spectral decay and distortion could yield an interpretation of how and why these things are different with data points.

Regardless, I would always rather play with my options and listen to each, or combine elements to unlock new textures than analyze the data and ponder which theoretical outcome would be 'best'. Synergy and emergence exist in the physical, mechanical domain too. The target isn't a series of data outcomes, but a lived experience.

"Damping and pad materials sound to my ears just like they feel to my fingers."

That is simile, not synaesthesia.

Back in the day, did you ever sit and watch colours pouring out of the speakers? /That/ is synaesthesia :)

I always think synaesthesia = overlap of any senses. Perhaps another word is better. Congruence? Singularity? I suppose sound and touch are so entangled it feels odd even to think of them as separate.

Now I'm thinking of the videos I've seen online of deaf people mimicking what they believe a certain sound would be. They're usually pretty accurate!

@E_Schaaf synesthesia can be visual, auditory, olfactory etc - the experience of a sensory stimulus in another sense (light/sound from the example above). I think that navigating work using crossed sensory connections is really fascinating and has the potential to produce really novel results. I love your description of hearing the feel of the headphone pads.

synaesthesia is when your senses get their lines crossed, literally. That would be like hearing the texture of the pads with no sound playing. I did my bit of "neurological research" as a hippy guy long ago ;).

Seriously, I think that there is a perceptual/psychological side to this, and it might come under the heading of expectation bias? Don't freak at the word bias ;). It's not a bad word. It's part of life.

Yes of course - it is a wiring thing. From what @E_Schaaf is describing, this could be what's going on, or it could be simile as you put it.

I do have a sense of the sound of a material through my fingertips even when sound isn't playing through a transducer. The transducers in this context are my nerve endings, and they're inputs instead of outputs. Either the wires are crossed or I've just trained myself deeply enough that I can't separate my expectation bias from my immediate perception. :Shrug:

I think it shows experience and maybe some special cross wiring - but it seems like what good artists/engineers/specialists in a specific field experience with intuition. You just know what could work to solve a problem/where it comes from/what would be good design just by looking at it, way before running a simulation or measurement. Just hours and days and years of time spent and its a good thing!