Unit 14 Listening Skills Task 2

Task 2 - In this task I will be talking about the sonic components and faults in the song ‘Hit the road jack’ by Ray Charles. 

Natural Sonic Components 

Natural sonic components are components that appear naturally in urban environments, which mean that a variety of sounds can be heard from whichever environment, you are in. For example, if you are in the staircase of a college building and someone decided to shout, right after they shout there will be an echo. This is due to the sound waves being bounced off on the walls surrounding you. Sound will reflect off harder surfaces where as soft surfaces will both reflect and absorb the sound. 

An acoustic environment is the size of a room in which a sound takes place and this can be determined by how much reverb there is for example if there is a lot of reverb then it was either recorded in a large concert hall or has had a plugin put on it to make it sound a particular way. The acoustic environment of this song is similar to a medium sized concert hall. You can tell this by the reverberations made by all the instruments being played such as the trumpets, horns and piano. 

 Sound Spectrum & Frequency Range 

The sound spectrum is the band of sound in which humans can hear. It shows the variety of frequencies there are in a sound. It is normally presented in a graph form. The frequency is measured in waves per second which is also known as hertz (Hz) and one thousand hertz is a kilohertz (kHz) which is thousands of waves passing a point per second. The human hearing range is from 20Hz – 20 kHz. 

In this song the vocals have quite a low volume whereas the instruments have a higher volume, this could be due to the instruments being the focal point of the mix. This is due to the fact that there was only one microphone for the four vocalists and due to the environment the vocals had a lot more reverb which means their position in the depth of field would have changed and would have been pushed back in the mix.  

 Sonic Field 

Sonic field is any place where sound is present and can be represented by a 3-axis graph: X – Stereo Y – amplitude Z – Depth. When instruments are placed in a certain way in order to present balanced sound. For example; if you were at a huge concert, the sound that the people right in front of the artist will hear will be different to what the people further away can hear. This can be altered by adjusting the volume and panning it to the left and right and also adding effects like reverb to give the feel of the sound being in a large space.  The sonic field includes components such as the Mix. This mix helps to create an equal balance between instruments and can be used to change an instruments position in the sonic field. This can be done by using the EQ. An Equalizer (EQ) is a tool used by producers and engineers to shape different sounds and boost or cut unwanted frequencies for example, pops and clicks. An EQ can also be used to make a sound clearer through boosting and cutting frequencies. This makes mixing a track easier as you are less likely to get low/high frequency build up which could result in peaking of the master volume which cause distortion. By balancing out the instruments, this can give any sort of feel that the artist or producer is trying to achieve. They can emphasize certain sounds in the mix or blend certain instruments to give off clarity.   

Sound effects and Processors 

Sound effects are used to alter individual or groups of sounds via bussing or FX. These effects can be used to modulate sounds such as chorus or flanger. There are effects that can have subtle changes to a sound and then there are effects that can completely change the sound into something different. Some effects are used to alter the acoustic environment of a sound for example, reverb and delay. There are hardware effects such as pedals, fuzz boxes and reverb effects which are used within the mix. There are also virtual effects on a DAW such as distortion, overdrive, echo, delay etc that can be used to manipulate sound. In this song there could have been a lot of effects that could have been used in order for the vocals and instruments to sound a lot more balanced. The EQ could have been used to remove certain frequencies.   

Song Analysis: Hit the road jack - Ray Charles  

After listening to this live performance I think that there could have been quite a few improvements. At certain points in the performance (0:49) the volume of the vocals suddenly dipped low almost as if it was being cancelled out by another instrument/voice or maybe the engineer was changing their levels. Also there wasn’t a balance between the instruments being played and the vocalists, which meant that they couldn’t be heard as much and were being overpowered by the instruments. To avoid being overpowered the tech team could’ve turned down the instruments or could’ve have done a more thorough sound check to make sure that the instruments wouldn’t be overpowering the vocalists. To avoid dips in vocals the engineer could’ve been more cautious when editing the singer’s levels. Also due to the fact that the 4 backup singers where singing in to 1 microphone the harmonic effect they should have wasn’t as prominent. Also the backup singers sound as if a high pass filter has been used to give clarity to their voice when it actually creates a high almost squeaky texture to the overall sound.