What makes music sound…good?

Curtis Segarra: A lot of us love sound. Or at least sounds put together as music. And we all have songs and sounds we love and…ones we hate. Sometimes, it’s the lyrics of the song or the personality of the person who is singing that can make us love or hate a song. But is there more to it than that?

Stephen Kurpis: It’s distortion, it’s distortion.

Curtis Segarra: That’s Stephen Kurpis, an audio engineer who’s been involved with everything from punk bands to recording audiobooks. Now, I thought I knew what distortion was. It’s that loud, rough noise guitars make in rock bands.

{Distorted Guitar Montage, Van Halen style}

But as it turns out, there’s more to making something sound good than just loud guitars. To help me understand distortion, I visited Stephen in his studio in Brooklyn, New York.

Stephen and I settle into a small recording studio packed with instruments and equipment. The space is designed to make good sounds, but Stephen explains that “good” doesn’t mean clear and perfect.

Stephen Kurpis: Distortion is a unfairly maligned, dirty word. But distortion literally makes everything aesthetically interesting that we hear in audio. I don’t mean like obvious distortion, like hearing someone sing into a blown out microphone… I just mean really subtle things that can make sounds slightly larger, slightly, fatter…

Tae Hong Park: That’s a very interesting concept you mentioned.

Curtis Segarra: And this is Tae Hong Park, a music technology and composition professor at NYU. He says distortion works because as listeners, we don’t like things to sound too perfect.

Tae Hong Park: Humans don’t like perfection. It’s kind of funny how that works out.
It’s all about the errors that happen and they have to happen in a meaningful way for it to be beautiful. It’s not random, but certainly not perfect cause a sine tone does not sound very musical.

Curtis Segarra: A sine tone? That’s a single, pure note with no distortion.

{Sine tone unitone from Tae’s computer fades in, then fades out.}

Curtis Segarra: Sound, of course is a vibration of the air — and that causes your eardrum to vibrate. That back and forth of sound isn’t easy to imagine, so let’s think of it as a wave — a line going up and down. Up and down. To change the sound, you can simply chop off the rounded tops and bottoms of that sound wave, tae explains. This process is called clipping. It converts the nice, smooth, round wave into something more square-shaped. And that is distortion.

Curtis Segarra: Here’s that smooth tone again.

{fade into unitone fade out}

Curtis Segarra: And here’s that tone with the top and bottom cut off.

{Fade into clipped unitone}

Curtis Segarra: According to Tae this clipping technique creates additional sound, or harmonics, caused by overlapping sound waves.

Tae Hong Park: And that’s what a lot of people love: that we’re making worse to make it better.

Curtis Segarra: So distortion is a big part of making things sound good. But it’s not the only thing…

{Singing Opera in the shower, fade out}

Tae Hong Park: It’s all about the reflections…showers, have tiles and because you have tiles you have more reflections.

Curtis Segarra: Reflections of sound

Tae Hong Park: At one point they all sort of merge and become reverb. So you sort of hear an extension of your voice, and it makes you sound pretty awesome.

Curtis Segarra: So when we sing in the shower, the sound waves leave our mouth and begin bouncing off the tiles all around us and eventually back to our ears.

{Sung word and Echo of sung word with slight delay in-between}

Curtis Segarra: But in the close quarters of the shower, sound returns to our ears fast enough that it doesn’t sound like an echo. Instead, It sounds like our singing continues even after we close our mouth. Listen to what happens as the reflection returns to us faster and faster.

{Sung word and echo looped and sped-up until they blend together}

Curtis Segarra: The original sound and the reflection begin to blend together to make one longer sound. That’s reverb, and it makes our voices sound better in the shower. In fact, these same principles of reverb and distortion are used in the music industry all the time.

Curtis Segarra: This is Luke DuBois, a digital media professor at NYU who also creates, composes, and studies music. He says Motown’s famous sound is nothing more than trickery using those principles of reverb and distortion.

Luke DuBois: What they would do is they would play the recording out of a speaker at the top of their air shaft onto a mic recording it onto a tape deck at the bottom of their air shaft.
But the trick was the tapes were going too fast.

Curtis Segarra: And as this sped-up recording traveled down the airshaft, it would reverberate, like singing in the shower.

Luke DuBois: And then when they slowed it back down to normal speed, it sounded like she was in a massive church. And that was like a state secret. That was like the reverb of Motown.

{Sped-up music fades in, then slows down revealing beautiful echo}

Luke DuBois: For most Americans or most people, there’s a production quality that’s evolved that gives every generation an understanding of what it means to sound good. So like right now it’s, you know, lots of bass, double tracked vocals, reverb.

Curtis Segarra: So our idea of “good” sound changes over time.

Matthew Goodheart: So the type of harmony used in a Bach piece, for example, is very different than the type of harmony used in a Duke Ellington piece.

Curtis Segarra: That’s Matthew Goodheart Goodheart. He’s a musician and a music composition professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Matthew Goodheart: Duke Ellington’s harmony has a lot of notes that would have been considered very dissonant in an earlier time. But by that time we get to the 1940s, it’s like, oh, those extra notes actually sounded really good, at least to the contemporary ears.

Curtis Segarra: So it’s not easy to say exactly what makes something sound “good.” There are common elements that tend to make music interesting, like distortion and reverb. And there are also elements that usually do not sound good, like dissonant notes or high frequency noises. But, there’s no hard and fast rules.

Stephen Kurpis: If you’re feeling sad, like just dim your lights and put on the Smiths and just lay on your couch and order Indian food if you want to {beep} turn up, go to the {beep} club, man. Get your most, obnoxious {beep} friend. And just blast some {beep} Luda man or just, you know, go nuts. It’s your music.

Curtis Segarra: For Scienceline, I’m Curtis Segarra. Thank you, and enjoy the music.

Additional Credit:
Thank you to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Jeff Gazdacko for aiding in recording.