Sound engineering refers to the usage of technology for the purposes of creating, managing and producing sound. Most people are unaware that sound engineering and its allied technologies are used extensively beyond the sphere of music, even though its use in relation to music is the most popular.
The use of sound engineering is seen in all media fields, manufacturing, medical, military, sports, science and research and many more than we can conveniently list here. We shall however limit ourselves to sound engineering in relation to music and its performance.
Sound Engineering in Music
As mentioned already sound engineering comes up anywhere music shows up. In composition, a writer determines the moods and shades of sound his melody produces by his inner musical intuition based on his perception of a sound.
A singer gauges the texture or volume of a sound based on this inner picture of what it should sound like when sung. The conductor of an orchestra anticipates a swell in sound and has to gesture in his conducting so that the ensemble can create it. A bassist turns a high frequency or treble knob on his combo trying to reach for certain clarity. The audience in a concert hall or theatre looks very relaxed and comfortable because the sound is pleasing to listen to.
Everything relating to music makes some form of judgment either to listen to a sound or to produce it and this is the basic platform on which sound engineering is built. All the lofty gadgets we see and use are meant to aid us in how we produce sound and how we perceive it when we receive it. The aim of sound engineering in music is to make sound comfortable, clear and pleasing to hear.
Developmental Stages Of Sound Technology
The development of sound engineering in relation to music has gone through three different major phases namely the acoustic age, the electronic age and lately the digital age.
The Acoustic Age
Man's first musical instruments were designed to take advantage of natural laws regarding air and space. By simple experiments like blowing air through tube-like objects like the bamboo and using thin strips of well dried leather as strings. Other variations like the veins of large animals were dried and used as strings.
These were strung over dried empty gourds and the gateway to serious manufacturing of instruments that could generate notes begun. The nature of the pitch, softness and stability of the bamboo sound depended on various factors of acoustics. The sound produced was dependent on how wide or long the tube was. It also depended on how dry or wet the bamboo was and how many holes or air exit points were on the instrument.
The others were how hard or soft one blew it and how small or wide the mouth hole was for blowing. For the stringed instruments the gourd was the sound box within which the loudness or softness of the sound was determined.
The leather strings also played a huge part. If they were very elastic they could control how tight or loose they would be strung over the gourd making it possible to have strings for high pitch or low pitched notes.
The last factor was the player. If a man wanted the instrument to sound louder he needed to play harder or increase the size of his sound box. From these basic principles instruments like the guitar, flute, piano, harp, drums, tambourines, shakers and most of the instruments used in the traditional African or European orchestras were made and brought to standard global use.
Man also realized the difference in the behavior of sound when it was placed in different environments from enclosed places to spacious ones. The realization that wind or moving air played a significant part of a sounds behavior was not lost to man. All these over time informed the quality of acoustic instruments made and how they were to be played.
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