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Listening the way the artist intended

Wigwam Jones

Wigwam Jones

Caesar non supra grammati
It's kind of funny. I hear this phrase, or variations of it, quite a bit from my fellow audio enthusiasts. I'm not entirely sure it means what they think it means.

I feel that the phrase is often used to club other people over the head for listening to or enjoying 'less than' perfect systems. In other words, if you're not spending a fortune on the very latest, most technically accurate gear, then you're not listening "the way the artist intended." Heaven forfend we adjust a tone knob or touch an equalizer, or (OMG) push in the 'loudness' button on vintage gear. What a crime.

I mean, I think we all enjoy good music that pleases our ears. But what, exactly, do we know about "what the artist intended?"

I suppose all artists of every kind have some thought as to how their artwork will be enjoyed. They create their art, be it a painting or a poem or a novel or a song or whatever, and they put it out into the world, and I am reasonably certain that they're not all mercenaries interested only in making money from their artwork. I presume that they have some emotional connection to what they've created and that they have some idea how others might best enjoy their work.

But do they have some perfect ideal in mind of where in a room one might sit, what speakers one might employ, what amplifier, what medium can be used to reproduce their artwork?

Do you suppose that somewhere, a musician is cringing in horror at the thought that someone is using (gasp) Bluetooth to stream their precious baby? Do you think they want to rush over to that lowborn person's hovel and slap the remote out of their hands? "It's Vandersteen or nothing, peasant!"

Perhaps they have duels amongst themselves. One artist prefers people enjoy their creations on McIntosh, others have D’Agostino on the brain, and somewhere there is a lone artist screaming about Bose and B&O and preparing to end it all in angst that people would listen on a Tripath amp.

I don't think so. I have never met such an artist. Perhaps they exist. But I doubt it.

What I suspect instead is that artists who actually have a preference would say that they would like others to ENJOY their artwork. However they do it, the point is to find personal enjoyment in taking in that artist's creation. The artist lays before us a bounty, and certainly they'd like us to find it delectible, but do they care if we extend our pinkies before we drink our tea?

So when I hear someone say "I prefer to listen to the music the way the artist intended," I think what they really mean is that they have found their own personal audio nirvana, and everyone who doesn't agree with their choices is wrong.

Yes, I prefer to listen to music the way the artist intended. I prefer to enjoy it. If that takes place on a high-end system or a vintage lo-fi system or over my car radio or streaming Bluetooth from my Plex server, or whatever...if I enjoy it, it's the way the artist intended, I believe.
 
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malden said:
"what the artist intended" ends in the studio or live performance, after that, all bets are off.

It's simply another cliche that audio nerds like to use in unsophisticated attempts at bolstering arguments.
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I'll chime in to defend the audio nerds to the extent that I think they earnestly do have a notion that there is some yardstick by which the artist intended their music to be enjoyed. I just have trouble understanding what that might be, having never met an artist that expressed a preference.

In fact, of the few actual working musicians I've known in my life, some of them seemed rather agnostic about music playback systems and one of them owned a Bose Wave Radio, so...
 
2FarGone said:
It seems pretentious to presume one knows what an artist intended in the first place.
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I would not go quite that far. I'd say it's a common point of view, but I just don't know exactly what it means. I think I understand what the person saying it thinks it means though.
 
Pretentious marketing phrase that attempts to imply that listening to music on anything less than perfect is an affront to the artist.

A LOT of music is intended to be listened to cranked to 11 on a car stereo blasting down the highway, or in a loud noisy club at ear bleed volumes.

Musicians dont give a **** how we listen to their music, they're just happy we do.
 
noahBH said:
Pretentious marketing phrase that attempts to imply that listening to music on anything less than perfect is an affront to the artist.

A LOT of music is intended to be listened to cranked to 11 on a car stereo blasting down the highway, or in a loud noisy club at ear bleed volumes.

Musicians dont give a **** how we listen to their music, they're just happy we do.
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I recall reading that at least back in the bad old days, producers would listen to playback on AM radios in cars for the marketing-related reason that it had to sound good that way if they intended to get radio play and record sales. Stereo separation and presences and such things were the furthest things from their minds. But then, they were producers, not the actual musicians.
 
I doubt that Carlos really intended for the Supernatural disk to be so highly compressed and sound lousy even on mega buck systems.
 
Wigwam Jones said:
I'll chime in to defend the audio nerds to the extent that I think they earnestly do have a notion that there is some yardstick by which the artist intended their music to be enjoyed.
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I'm an audio nerd myself, but I HATE cliches.....:yikes:...........:rflmao:
 
Before there was recorded music, artists determined the order in which their works were to be consumed by the order in which they performed them. In the golden age of the LP, artists often arranged the order of tracks on a record to reinforce a theme or concept. Even then, this sequence was thrown out the window by the extraction of hit songs played on the radio. That's where I got on, and as I came of age I lost my taste for radio in favor of playing albums all at once. More recently, after experimenting with MP3s in the car, I gave up on shuffle in favor of keeping the albums intact. To me, listening as the artist intended means preserving the sequence that they established.
 
daveshel said:
Before there was recorded music, artists determined the order in which their works were to be consumed by the order in which they performed them. In the golden age of the LP, artists often arranged the order of tracks on a record to reinforce a theme or concept. Even then, this sequence was thrown out the window by the extraction of hit songs played on the radio. That's where I got on, and as I came of age I lost my taste for radio in favor of playing albums all at once. More recently, after experimenting with MP3s in the car, I gave up on shuffle in favor of keeping the albums intact. To me, listening as the artist intended means preserving the sequence that they established.
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At least with popular music on LP, I suspect that the order was sometimes determined by how they fit on each side, and which they thought would be 'hits'. Of course, there are concept albums that did in fact have a preferred flow to them.

But how many people (besides me) listen to the entire 'Chess' album rather than just "One Night in Bangkok," by Murray Head?

I mean, listen the way you wish of course; it's all about what we prefer, right? But I'm just not sure that the order songs appear on an album have any particular significance in most cases.
 
GChief said:
I have oft been in the studio or control room for recordings and final mixes. Many care and put in the effort to get the sound they want us to hear.

Its works, even on different systems :thumbsup:
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I wonder if it would be more accurate to say "The should they want to create," rather than "The sound they want us to hear." I just have difficulty imagining some artist or producer with a burning desire that we hear in the way they want us to hear. I mean, even at a very basic level, our ears are all different, right? I don't hear what others hear, even if I'm sitting in the same room listening to the same performance. How can anyone dictate what I *should* be hearing? They don't even know what I hear or how I experience it.
 
Once music is placed in the public realm, either by sale or giving away free, the rights of use pass to the consumer and there should be no expectations otherwise, except for of course activities that legally amount to theft (you know what those are). In past decades, all artists knew (or should have known) that their work could very well end up being listened to on a tinny sounding one-speaker radio or a cheap noisy record player. I believe record companies even tried to make their released music sound as good as
reasonably possible on those kinds of devices.

I even read once something said by a successful music producer (I forget his name) - he said that one of the final steps in the process was to play a test pressing of the (hopefully finished) recording on an inexpensive record player (not turntable). If the music coming out of it was deemed as not sounding good enough, he said, it didn't matter how good it sounded in the studio - they had to go back and make whatever changes necessary so that it sounded good enough on that cheap record player. He also mentioned that fact as being a little depressing after having gone through that whole recording studio process.
 
Wigwam Jones said:
I wonder if it would be more accurate to say "The should they want to create," rather than "The sound they want us to hear." I just have difficulty imagining some artist or producer with a burning desire that we hear in the way they want us to hear. I mean, even at a very basic level, our ears are all different, right? I don't hear what others hear, even if I'm sitting in the same room listening to the same performance. How can anyone dictate what I *should* be hearing? They don't even know what I hear or how I experience it.
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Guess they are "lying" when they are saying words that mean that during the creative process :dunno:

Of course our hobby is full of people that over think (Nuke) things, I am sure some of that is happen in this very thread.

Edit: The engineer would often send me home with the "final mix" to get my feed back.
 
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Wigwam Jones said:
...when I hear someone say "I prefer to listen to the music the way the artist intended," I think what they really mean is that they have found their own personal audio nirvana, and everyone who doesn't agree with their choices is wrong.
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If an artist gives a rats ass about that, they indeed are very different from the recording artists I know. These folks are either hard at work to get their income to a decent level from (or next to-) their art in this platform day and age or hard at work to keep making a living from their back catalogue + in the process of re-inventing themselves. (I generalize, but the pattern in very clear).

Artists love people who love art. Gear snobbery is a long way from that.

On the other hand I know several artists who are tremendously obsessed with their instruments and associated gear. But they know how they'll be perceived if they let that spill out (see the Spinal Tap 'we go to 11'/don't even look at that guitar bit) so they keep it to themselves.
Perhaps someone should to make a mockumentary about Audiophiles.
 
A ridiculous phrase in my book. This implies that if you have less than studio-grade equipment, you can't really enjoy music and high sound quality. Sorry, respectfully disagree!

A nice marketing phrase to justify many high price things (MQA, silver cables, $30,000 amps, $200,000 turntables, etc. etc.)
 
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