With the increased availability of recording equipment, recording music at home
has become more popular and widespread than ever before. There is a widespread
belief that home recordings are comparable to studio recordings, though the genre
of music and production style are often not taken into account. The influence of
the recording space is, in fact, more noticeable in music recorded primarily acoustically
with microphones and minimal use of virtual instruments or computer-generated
sounds.
In this thesis, I compare two recordings of an acoustic guitar made in different
spaces: a music studio and a home room. The same excerpt from the same piece
is played on both recordings. I first used the recordings to measure selected
objective characteristics of the spaces and the recordings themselves, and then I
focused on the differences that listeners perceived between the recordings. They
expressed their perceptions through an online survey, in which, upon noticing a
difference, they also selected their preferred recording and described both with
words.
The results did not show significant differences in the objective measurements.
Nevertheless, the majority of respondents noticed a difference between
the recordings, though neither one significantly stood out as the preferred choice.
Furthermore, statistical analysis did not reveal any other statistically significant
differences in the descriptions of the recordings or any correlation between the
groups of respondents, the equipment used, and the selected recording.
|
