【Cleopatra’s Daydream × Pastel Piano: A Hi-Fi Discussion】
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It’s a three-day weekend, yet outside it’s all driving rain and wind from a typhoon — the kind that feels genuinely frightening. Amid all that, this week I had a most worthwhile discussion about Hi-Fi on Twitter with Cleopatra’s Daydream, someone I got to know through the platform. The conversation was rich and full of all sorts of useful insights, and it felt a shame to simply let it scroll away, so I’d like to preserve the tweet log here on the blog in several instalments.
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Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream · 10 September
There is nothing in this world more troublesome than a Hi-Fi system with no groove. When that happens, the performance is as good as dead. I’ve actually encountered this — with someone who was moderately well known, at that. On Twitter, rather than a long reasoned explanation, a short phrase that clicks immediately for the people who get it seems to work best. Because for those who don’t get it, no amount of explaining will help anyway.
When the sound is stuck fast to the speakers, the music simply doesn’t sing. At that point, a 12 cm driver will stay sounding like a 12 cm driver no matter what, and even a 38 cm woofer loses that sense of grip on the air. But when the sound detaches from the speakers, you forget the size of the driver altogether, and what comes out is a full, resonant sound — as though it were life-size (or so you’d swear). At that point even a 12 cm speaker can make a cello sound the size of an actual cello. Even a mini hi-fi system, once you get the knack, can be coaxed into something convincing. In terms of quality it’s cheap, yes — but music has to sing first, before anything else. You need to feel the groove, feel the soul.
Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · 11 September
> There is nothing in this world more troublesome than a Hi-Fi system with no groove. When that happens, the performance is as good as dead.
That is precisely what one would call a sound that lacks musicality.
Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream · 11 September
Quite so. It does fall within the very broad concept of musicality. I haven’t been reading music or audio magazines lately, so I’m rather out of touch with how things stand these days… Audio critics in the 1970s used to talk constantly about whether something had high or low musicality. I rather thought the term had been phased out for being too vague — is it still in common use?
Saying something lacks musicality is too broad. Saying it lacks blues, or that you can’t feel the groove, doesn’t really clarify things much either. But again, for those who get it, it clicks immediately. Words that reach the right person are words that set the resonating chamber inside their heart vibrating. A chamber that resonates with absolutely everything across a vast frequency range… well, that’s no longer resonance, is it. You’d get some echo, perhaps. “What is the blues?” “Something they can’t teach you at Berklee or Juilliard.” I can’t recall the name now, but some jazz musician said that once.
Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · 11 September
The word “musicality” — clinging to it and using it constantly may well be something only I do, on the internet at least… I haven’t been reading magazines much these past few years either. I buy them, flick through, and put them on the shelf. My own definition of musicality has various layers when I break it down in detail, but what I have believed with conviction since childhood as a pianist comes down to this: whether a sound is alive or dead.
This applies equally to performers as to audio equipment — a player with genuine talent breathes life into sound without even thinking about it. Just as exceptional motor ability is rare, genuine musical talent is something few people possess. It is not something that can be acquired after the fact. Japan is poorly attuned to talent education, and so among young people aspiring to be musicians, as well as among working teachers, those with real talent are vanishingly few. If you have surface technique, you can get by even with dead sound.
Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream · 11 September
Agreed — and I strongly identify with the idea that this is a matter of talent. Japan does have a tendency to celebrate effort over talent. You can polish a talent you have, but you cannot polish a talent you don’t have. And that’s true well beyond music.
Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · 11 September
Because so much of the effort to learn Western music in Japan has been driven by determination rather than talent, you end up with educators who had no talent to begin with, trying to polish what was never there, and veering into Spartan-style effort and a soulless technical approach. Artistic expression gets substituted for technical accuracy, and the handful of young people who do have genuine musical talent are frequently misjudged by educators who cannot recognise it, their emerging gifts suppressed by that misreading and by the envy of those around them. It’s a rather vicious cycle.
Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream · 11 September
I’m in no position to say anything about talent education, but what you describe is not at all hard to imagine. When you can make a living entirely on domestic popularity and recognition… well, I suppose it’s just… how to put it.
Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · 11 September
In the case of audio equipment too, I think it ultimately comes back to whether the designer responsible for voicing the sound was born with musical talent — whether they have the instinctive capacity to grasp the life and soul of music. The only difference is whether the means of expression is an instrument or a machine. I should add that sound quality and musicality, as I use those terms here, are entirely separate axes of evaluation.
Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream · 11 September
I think of all audio equipment — not just speakers — as instruments, though I’d say it’s less each individual component and more the system as a whole that becomes the instrument for its owner. The instrument that plays out the music living inside one’s own heart. Because after you’ve listened to something hundreds of times, that music comes to dwell within you.
Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · 11 September
I feel the same. For the listener, starting from the choice of components, through to combinations and setup and everything else, you can either bring out or spoil the musicality of the original performance as it passes through the filter of the Hi-Fi equipment. In the end, the essence of playback as an art is determined by the talent of the user. That said, even if a listener has the capacity to feel the heart of music, if they have no practical know-how to work with, and no realistic access to suitable equipment, it’s like having no proper instrument — there’s no way to develop the skill. There are budget barriers to developing taste in equipment selection too…
Continues in Twitter Log 2: On the Different Tonal Balance of Each Hi-Fi System.
【Cleopatra’s Daydream × Pastel Piano: A Hi-Fi Discussion】
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