Sound Reproduction and Perception

Imagine you've gone to hear your favorite musician in concert. After the concert is over, you'd like a souvenir (from the French word for “remember”) of the evening. Today, that auditory souvenir would be a recording, most likely a CD or MP3 of the performance. You would want it to sound as much like the live show as possible, to capture the emotional qualities of the performance as well as the sound of the concert hall, the spatial image of the sound, and the unique sound of the instruments—collectively, all aspects of the fidelity of the recording (from the French fidélité: accuracy and faithfulness). Not all sound recording has fidelity as its goal, however. In recent decades, artists and engineers have experimented with sounds that ...