Are my ears just biological microphones?

Musicians brains are highly trained in playing their instruments, however, listening and hearing objectively while playing those instruments also has to be practised!

One element that makes objective listening very difficult is Auditory Masking.

Auditory Masking and MusicianShip

The main categories of auditory masking are broadly divided by when they occur (simultaneously or temporally) and by their underlying mechanism (energetic or informational). 

Time Based Masking

Simultaneous Masking (Spectral or Frequency Masking): Occurs when the target sound and the masking sound (masker) happen at the same time.

 The masker makes the target sound inaudible or less audible due to overlap in frequency content within the auditory system's filters.  

Mixing with your limbs

Drumming is about ‘mixing’ the elements of your groove to avoid masking and allow elements of the groove to ‘poke’ through.

Musicians need to ‘mix’ their sound so that the focus sound becomes louder and is revealed…in drumming this means adjusting the volume of each stroke and also each limb's force and articulation to make the groove ‘cook’ and not be swamped by one element.

Frequency masking

The greatest masking effect happens when the sounds have similar frequencies, and the effect spreads more to higher frequencies than lower ones (upward spread of masking).

On percussion and drum kits, tuning for separation in the frequency spectrum in context of which drums sound together most often is better than tuning drums separately to a pitch/pitches.  A floor tom and a bass drum sounding great alone may become mushed together when they occupy similar spectral ranges.  Diametrical difference helps here…

Non-Simultaneous Masking

 Occurs when the target and masker sounds do not entirely overlap in time.  
Forward Masking (Post-masking): The masker sound precedes the target sound. 

The masking effect is due to the persistence of neural activity after the masker has stopped, and it can last up to 200 milliseconds.

A flam on a djembe or snare, therefore, primes the listeners brain for what is to come and gets in, in front, of the other sounds that occur very close in time to the flame…A flam therefore isn’t about a volume increase but a timing ‘alert’!

Backward Masking (Pre-masking): 

The masker sound follows the target sound. This effect is generally weaker and much shorter in duration, typically only occurring if the time gap is less than 20 milliseconds.    20 milliseconds is 1/50 of a second. A HemiDemiSemi-Quaver roll at 60 Crotchets per minute tempo has notes that are 1/62 beats per second…(approx.)!!  Variation the micro-beat of your closed rolls, and the tone via using different modes of the skin can make your rolls sounds more musical than focusing on even-ness alone!

Energetic Masking

This is the most common and well-understood type, largely due to peripheral interference where the physical energy of the masker sound overpowers the target sound within the ear's mechanisms (like the basilar membrane). 

This can be accounted for by the Spectro temporal overlap of the competing sounds.

Getting super fast kick drum work to be clean and audible and musical without swamping the rest of the drums and the band is a true artform!

Informational Masking

This type of masking occurs at higher processing levels in the central nervous system and is not caused by simple energy overlap in the periphery. 

Both sounds might be audible, but the listener has difficulty distinguishing the target sound due to confusion, attention factors, or the acoustic similarity of the sources (e.g., trying to hear one voice in a crowded restaurant, or the "cocktail party effect"). 

Listening as an Engineer and a Musician

The art of listening dominates here…and is the reason why audio engineers and mastering engineers are so essential!  Music isn’t about pitch and rhythm alone!    

Sound into the ears goes through the brain and the brain makes sense of that sound and that sense is far from ‘Literal’…

Being aware of how much the sound is ‘filtered and interpreted’ by the listener, by other band members, and by you yourself can help you to make the most musical effect of your playing…and this is the objective of those thousands of hours of practice.

At Symmetrical Drumming Australia I use my decades of working as a sound engineer to imbue my playing with an objective ‘ear’ as much as I can…mixing the elements of my individual sounds and limbs to create the overall groove.

Icons of objective groove

Great players like Steve Gadd and David Jones do this exceptionally well. 

And such exquisite playing exhibited by Steve and David comes from decades of playing and listening back to recordings afterwards…

Objective assessment of your playing while you do it can only be done (initially) in a limited way due to the brain intervention is so many ways. 

Listening back, noting where things need to be tweaked is essential!

Nowadays, video recording your practice sessions is fast and easy and quality is good on a phone!   

Thanks for reading

Mark