Background Noise

We are bombarded by sound. Whether it’s blatantly in the foreground, or passively in the background, there is almost always something, however passive it may be, that is interrupting the intended signal that is reaching our ears.

In most cases, these go unquestioned and we continue on our lives. We become immune to things like the hum of the air conditioner or the rushing of the wind as we drive with our windows down. We’re aware that these sources of noise are present, but we just compensate for them and assume all is well. After all, if you can increase your signal to noise ratio, you should be able to understand more of the signal.

But what I’ve been noticing, and note that this is something I’ve known all along, is that, with music, the noise still has a significant impact on our perception. Depending on what the source of the noise is, it can represent very complex aural interference. All of the sudden, you have areas of frequency response that are muddied and cluttered to the point that everything within those specific ranges seems like it is part of the noise. Accordingly, we filter them out.

That’s the idea behind noise-cancelling headphones; we want to get rid of those sources of audible sludge. We want to cancel out the AC or the roar of a plane on a long flight. In general, headphones help with these sorts of noise sources, but sometimes they’re not an option and sometimes they still don’t do the music justice.

At that point, all the more you can do is try to eliminate the sources of noise. The difference will be surprising.

I’ve had the latest August Burns Red album playing in my car lately. I wanted a place to listen to it the whole way through and unfortunately I can’t just sit down at home with that sort of time; driving is often times the best opportunity. So I’m listening to it in my car. It’s got a good sound system, but nothing too great. I can deal with that. The big thing, though, was that I started to listen to it on a nice day, with my windows down.

Wind blowing in your ear, cascading between panes of glass, especially when coupled with the purr of the engine, destroys your mid range frequencies. I could crank the volume up as loud as possible, but vocals, chuggier guitar riffs, and a lot of tom work was just non-existent. Eventually, I rolled up the windows. Granted, there was still some car and road noise, but it cleaned things up that it was like listening to a whole new album; the difference was staggering. There was newfound clarity that so many others would have probably never even thought about.

And we don’t think about stuff like that. Music is considered background so often and is treated as such. Just this morning (Tuesday, i.e., country day at work) I was trying to block out the music in the office. It was working pretty well, sinking softly behind the hum of the AC. Then, for the first time in months, the fans shut off. The deafening silence pushed the music to foreground to an inescapable level; I had to reach out to my ipod.

But again, this idea that noise is dictating how we perceive music was thrown in my face. You probably have no idea how much richness is being choked out by a low signal to noise ratio. Not everyone has the resources to make an acoustically sound listening room to listen to music in perfect isolation. Not everyone can afford a $600 pair of really good headphones. But there are little things that make a huge difference, if you're willing to seek out change.

But if it’s an anomaly that even the bad music is void of such frequency convolution, how do we get good music to cut through?