Hear The Music

I was chatting with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart the other day about how music composition may have changed over the years. Technology does seem to get its fingers into all sorts of areas and the arts are no exception. Now Mozart, like Beethoven (although I have never met Beethoven before), could conceive of a full orchestral score (usually in several voicings) in

While returning from a short vacation in the Lunar Colonies, as I plummeted to earth, I thought that I would do an experiment.  Once the parachute opened I stepped out of the lunar shuttle to take some measurements on the way down.  As we know, almost all of acoustics, whether it’s the study of our hearing, musical instruments, noise in

Have you ever noticed that a trumpet or other horn is not straight, but is bent or has a curl?  A trumpet, if it were a straight tube, would probably need to be resting on the chair in front of the player, and the same would be true for all other brass instruments.  The tuba would need to be anchored

Recently I have become involved in the development of an acoustic pillow.  This is a rather interesting project and here is the story: When people lie down to watch television on the couch, the ear against the pillow is plugged up.  People lose the normal binaural summation- some benefits of two sided hearing- that they were used to experiencing.  Wouldn’t it

After seeing a movie over the holiday season, I was chased out of the movie theatre…. NEVER TAKE PICTURES IN THE MEN’S WASHROOM! So, here is the story… It was a pretty good movie and I used the washroom facilities afterwards.  While drying my hands I noticed a sign covered in plastic above the hot air blower and that’s when

One of my all-time favorite movies is Parent Trap- not the remake but the original starring Brian Keith, Maureen O’Hara and Haley Mills.  In the movie, the very wealthy grandmother of Haley Mills’ character, used one sentence to summarize the extreme wealth of the family and the large size of their house.  She said to a servant “Put both Steinways

Rick Ledbetter is a long time professional bass player and composer with a profound, late onset hearing loss. He has been programming his own aids through several sets, to meet his needs for live performance.  Rick is quite thoughtful about this area.  In April 2016 I had an open letter to hard of hearing musicians, which was repeated last week

  This was the most well-read blog in Hear the Music in 2016.  Not everyone agreed with everything that I had to say, but I guess that is what makes for a great blog!  Read the excerpt and please click the link to above to read it in full while I take some time over the holiday season to spend

Reverberation is the great equalizer. It can make great music sound the same as less-stellar counterparts. It can make a great speech in a large hall sound the same as one that is devoid of content, and it can distract anyone from the task at hand. And of course reverberation is like good wine – too much is as bad as too

An article in today’s Globe and Mail – one of Canada’s long-standing national newspapers – is about about Lars Ulrich, the drummer with Metallica and includes the quote: “I would get up from my bed in a hotel room to go turn the television off.  But the television wasn’t on. The sound was in my head.” For those readers who have been living