The Sounds Inside Our Heads
When Elizabeth Cohen first became interested in the intersection of music and computers, the field was largely confined to nerdy research engineers fiddling after-hours in their labs. In the 20-plus years since then, Cohen has helped create a wide range of tools that expanded the possibilities for music-making.
Cohen’s interest in music and electronics collided as a student at Bennington College in Vermont, where she earned degrees in music and physics in 1975. After a two-year stint at AT&T;’s prestigious Bell Labs, she headed west to Stanford University and earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in acoustics.
Since then she has served as acoustician for the Hollywood Bowl, helped design screening rooms for Dolby Laboratories, Digital Theater Systems and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and spent a year in Washington as an engineering fellow to the White House National Economic Council. She has maintained a consulting firm, Cohen Acoustical Inc., since 1981.
The effusive Cohen speaks about acoustical technology with a fervor approaching evangelism. As the current president of the Audio Engineering Society, a professional society based in New York, her current mission is to maximize the musical potential of the Internet, where she has already found many intriguing innovations.
The Cutting Edge caught up with Cohen last week in her home base of Los Angeles and asked her to share her perspective on acoustics and how the field is being changed by technology.
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Question: How important is audio compared with video?
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Answer: The ears lead the eyes. In other words, if you hear a child’s voice, your head turns. Your head always moves to the sound and then your eyes follow. So when we’re designing these new media systems, we do not want to compromise on the audio fidelity.
We have met the challenge of fitting ourselves in small pieces of real estate. Right now, the bandwidth allocated for audio is about 10% of the real estate--with the rest going to video--but we’re at least 50% of the experience. All you have to do is watch a film and turn the soundtrack off. Now that we have the opportunity to create new mediums such as DVD (digital videodisc) and HDTV (high-definition television), let’s make sure we get our due.
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Q: Why do you think audio is undersold?
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A: Look at the state of music education in the schools. We are not taught to value music. We’re used to a visual paradigm.
The idea about music has always been just to make it louder. But the great part about digital is that you can use the full spectrum. You can get silence, you can get the sensitive conversation and you can get the whispers. That’s something that’s truly wonderful.
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Q: What kind of consulting work do you do?
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A: I do room acoustics, which is the design of concert halls, scoring stages, dubbing stages and home theaters. I do models with computers that tell you about the behavior of sound in the room. Then there’s the tuning process of the room, where you use the speakers and adjust them, and that’s where the art comes in.
I also do a lot of what’s known as technology assessment, which is a combination of futurism and engineering. People and companies will come to me and ask, “What’s going to happen with car audio?” or “What’s going to happen with satellites?” I examine what we are capable of doing, what the new technologies are and how we should apply them to audio and to music.
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Q: How do you find answers to those questions?
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A: My fingers are in all kinds of pots, and I synthesize. I go by gut instinct and good research. It’s a hoot because you get to think of all of the possibilities.
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Q: How did you get into this field of computer music?
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A: I don’t really like the term “computer music.” Computers are just another tool to make music. The tools that I had 20 years ago--my 5-year-old goddaughter has that amount of power on her tiny little synthesizer, for God’s sake!
I could never make up my mind whether I wanted to be a scientist or a musician. I started building electronic instruments in college, and then I heard about the computer music project at Bell Labs. Bennington had some of the earliest synthesizer equipment, but when I got to Bell Labs it was like I was a kid and it was Christmas every day. Anything that was there was a potential musical instrument and could be used for making music.
After the lab would close at night, that’s when we all went to work and had fun. We’d sit there entering notes into the computer, working on conducting programs and making templates for every pop synthesizer thing you hear on the radio today.
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Q: What was your goal in doing that?
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A: Given the right tools, we could make better canvases for artists. There are things that we hear that we want to express, but we don’t necessarily have those tools. We’ve moved from papyrus to paper to LPs and now CDs and DVDs. And now we’re moving to bits where if we can have sufficient bandwidth we can actually get those things that are inside our heads and our imaginations and communicate them. That’s when the walls between people and cultures can come down.
What we succeeded in doing is getting the tools into the hands of the artists, and that’s what I’m still trying to do now. I’m making sure that the people who make the music are aware of what canvas they have and what they can do. Right now we’re offering to composers and artists tools they never had before. We’re offering them control of the spatial dimension of sound. This is a wonderful thing. There are things that these new mediums offer, and there’s no reason it should not be accessible to as many people as possible.
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Q: Do you ever wish you were the artist instead of the person making tools for the artist?
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A: My musicianship is not there. If I want to play music or sing in the shower, I have outlets for expression. But being in that interface position is what I do best. My voice can best be used enabling other people’s voices. I understand the music and I understand the engineering.
I see engineers as the guardians of the groove. Our role is to preserve that sacred aspect of music and to create the space for that to happen.
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Q: What are some technologies that are just starting to affect audio now?
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A: There’s this whole area of control over the spatial dimension of sound. Innovations in compression technology and the availability of more bandwidth have made it possible to have separate signals to each speaker.
Then there are virtual technologies that allow you to control what signal gets to what ear. We now understand the role of the outer ear in sound localization, and with cues from that and with other techniques, we can take two channels of audio and make convincing surround-sound illusions. Before you would get all this information and it would confuse you. Now we can cancel out certain signals so that you can get the directional information that is intended to create a natural sound.
So now musicians can choose to have the listener hear music from the point of view of being inside the band. Or they can decide they want a concert situation so the band is in front of them. Or they can select a particular instrument and put it way out to the side.
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Q: What impact is the Internet having on audio?
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A: I think the Internet is going to basically revolutionize music. My favorite example right now is WWOZ, a public radio station in New Orleans in the heart of the brass-band district. WWOZ has one of the greatest libraries of jazz and blues and folk music. This station sustains the local groove. They started to Netcast a little bit of JazzFest, then they started to Netcast a little bit of the live performances they were doing. They got a Web site. In the last fund-raising drive they did, their first contribution was $500 from Tokyo, Japan. Altogether they doubled their pledges this year from $60,000 to $120,000.
Right now you’ve got tons of information and this teeny straw. I’m trying to open up the straw.
My job is to look ahead and consider what all of the possible applications will be for broad band. We’re looking at building these open architectures that evolve and allow for innovation and allow our inventions to get into the pipeline and deliver things to the artists as soon as viable.
