Black and White Music

Mon, 08/06/2007 - 19:45 — Alan

Black and white photography exists as a major practice within photography. I've always preferred it to colour photography and it has its own skills and followers. What's the musical equivalent?

Analogue recording on tape reels? No, that's represented well enough by "film" and "negatives" in the world of photography. Photography has its own digital branch now and in some ways is introducing improved technology at a faster rate than audio is.

So what is a black and white photograph? Importantly it not only includes black and white, but shades of grey in between. The image has to be be interesting without colour. Contrast becomes more important than colour, range of tones including shadows and highlights are more important than beautiful and bold hues.

So what's left? It could be a low quality recording, e.g. a low sample rate? Again no, black and white is often shot with the same grain as colour, used to be the case that affordable fine grain film was black and white and not colour. With digital photography, the B&W images are created with the same optical sensors as colour images. Often it's only after the image has been taken, that the photographer decides it will be represented in black and white. With more practice, photographers develop an eye for deciding which scene would be best represented in B&W.

Low bit depth? No. Larger bit depth in audio allows for greater contrast between quiet and loud. With 24-bit depth, it allows us to record well above the noise floor and make the subject stand out. As mentioned above, contrast is more important in B&W than in colour photography so we need to retain bit depth.

Acoustic only? I thought this one was the correct answer for a short while. There's something about the simplicity of acoustic recordings that relates to the lack of colour in B&W images. However with acoustic only recordings, the engineer would be limiting the range of instruments; the equivalent in photography would be like only taking photos of landscapes. There's more subject matter out there than landscapes.

To delve deeper, what is a photograph?

It's an image featuring at least one subject and at least one of foreground and background. Usually it's a single shot as opposed to a composition of several shots. So perhaps B&W photography could be a recording using certain recording techniques or equipment. In audio, the noise floor is always present in the recording although hopefully a good signal-to-noise ratio would mean it's not distracting from the background. The background in audio could be chords and the subject would then be a melody. Have several subjects and you'd end up with several melodies.

Are we any closer to drawing a parallel? Yes, we've discounted technical aspects of the actual recording. No, we still don't have the answer.

How about recording using a specific technique? Stereo recording appears to me to be the best parallel. There's an inherent simplicity in the recording while retaining the complexity of the performance. The placement of the mic is akin to the colour filters that can be used on B&W photography. Something like M-S recording is the best parallel I can find to B&W recording.

I'm open to better example. Anyone?

I did think about recordings using certain notes, but most western music is recorded in keys anyway (and other genres usually have something equivalent) so that would have meant that nearly all of us are recording in B&W. That doesn't seem right to me.

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Comments

Mon, 03/10/2008 - 12:38 — Alan

thanks

Christian, thanks for the great comments.

You've provided an important alternative perspective. My viewpoint is tainted by thinking of the application of signal processing to images and audio files. The processing doesn't necessarily have to change the file, but could be used to view properties of the file, such as assessing how close to black and white is it.

With that perspective, I was trying to think of what properties would mean that an audio file could be classed as equivalent to a black and white image. I had assumed music rather that audio in general. Your mention of soundscapes made me realise my assumption. Good point.

I also like the point about the function of time, I've seen a few spectral analysers that will average out the values across the time and show a "signature" for the song as a whole. I think even the match plug-in in Logic does that to some extent.

I agree with you about texture. That makes me think that using an averaging function would probably remove the differences in texture of sound. How would we be able to tell the difference between the instruments if we couldn't hear the timbre?

The reason it's taken me a couple of days to respond is that I had trouble finding an article. Your response sparked a memory of an article a couple of years ago about passing audio through image processing. I found it again at SoundonSound. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the MonaLisa files are available at the site. Shame.

The only other relevant article I can find is From Magnitude Spectrum to Sound. There must be more out there, but I haven't been able to find any yet.

Fri, 03/07/2008 - 11:21 — Anonymous

B&W music escapes shapes

I'd like to discard the idea of B&W photo to be like stereo recording. Mic placement may be like colour filters, but these filters apply to any photograph, B&W or not. Furthermore, I find any still picture to be similar to stereo recording, since both are a somewhat flattened representation of a much wider and much deeper "subject"; that is, a real 3D environment.

Also, my first reflexion is about shape definition in photography. For example, an orange and a tennis ball might appear to be very much alike in B&W and colour - if it wasn't for texture. In other words, if texture and shape are not altered, then what are the parameters of B&W audio?

To draw an analogous musical concept to colour parameters would be to properly observe shade (black), tint (white) and colourfulness (grey). Personally, these categories do not give me satisfaction, since I do not fully understand color theories, much less addition and substraction of colour. Despite my deficiencies on the subject, I suppose these two properties of colours to be both useful first when taking a picture - and second when printing it.

How about a weird exemple? What is the musical equivalent of a B&W page in a text book!?! Humm... Maybe 26 changing tones divided in words, with a background of white noise?!?

Also, in comparison to chromatic colors, the tonal system is composed of 12 tones, which can be mixed and matched, with consonant and/or dissonant effects. But music is a time function, and photography is not - so that's where music is closer to cinematography then still pictures. Without regards to this differenciation, one could analyse "still" music, i.e. spectral activity at one point in time. Maybe there is a comparison to be made between spectrum of colour and spectrum of sound? Perhaps spectral music theories could bring an answer.

Finally, in the color domain, the white, black and greys are achromatic/neutral colours. The definition of an achromatic music scale is a pretty interesting question, considering traditional european music, microtonality an even atonality use chromas. Maybe Brian Eno's discreet music could be a "kind" of example in the creation of a neutral music.

What about soundscapes (such as the sound of the river flow and the wind in the leaves) ? How can colourfulness be extracted from them? And are we doused in the realm of concrete music yet? I'm not sure...

P.S.:That's a great subject to dwell upon! Very refreshing! Thanks, I'll keep on reading!

christian

Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

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