Music to Your Ears

baffies them as much as Beethoven's ONWAI\D A ND UPWAI\D WITH THE AI\T5 Ninth. They match at music as we snatched at movies, filli ng our heads with plural images. A friend with whom MUSIC TO YOUR EARS I was brooding over the way recorded sound supplies a soundtrack for modem The questfor 3-D recording and other mysteries ifsound life said that I ought to seek out Edgar Choueiri, a rocket scientist- really, a BY ADAM GOPNIK rocket scientist!- who has spent a good part of his life worrying about such things. C houeiri, my friend said, had broken the code of something funda mental about the reproduction ofsou nd, and so I went to Princeton, where he has two laboratories, to seek him out. Those of us who have no laboratory at all might regard what Choueiri mod estly calls his "other'' laboratory as the only laboratory that anyone would ever need. It is the size of a small airplane hangar, and it is filled with plasma rocket engines that run on electricity: instead of a wasteful explosion of liquid fuel, a judicious leak of ions pushes the craft forward through a vacuum. If we ever start commuting to Mars, it will likely be a Choueiri-style engine that gets us there and back. The president of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, Choueiri is also the president of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences, and is very much, in spirit and appearance, a man of the old Levant. There's the elegant classical nose, the high, anxious brows, and the worried ex pression. In his smaller laboratory, adja Edgar Choueiri wants recorded music to sound as ifthe petformers were in the room. cent to the rocket lab, he works on his musical projects, ttying to force three f all the amazing things the mind albums. My own teen-age kids, as ob dimensional sound from ordinary stereo O does, the most amazing may be sessed with music as I was, have an en speakers. By three-dimensional sound he that it can take sound and turn it into tirely different way of listening. They does not mean wraparound sound, the music, and then take music and turn it ignore the glowing-tube amp and classy kind produced by speakers posted strate into meaning. The rest of the double articulate speakers in our living room; gically around the room. (Elvis had fifty leaps the mind makes look almost easy they bounce instead to tinny earbuds, two speakers installed in his private jet, by comparison: we like pictures of ba and often spend hours listening to Tay the Lisa Marie, aying for that effect.) In bies at picnics in sunlight because, after lor Swift or Radio head on the still more Choueiri's system, when you listen to all, in the world we like sunny days and tinny speakers of their computers. Sound choral music by his hero, Bach- from chubby babies. The stories we tell in lit quality seems secondary to some other any pair of speakers, even the cheap ones erature are like the lies we tell in life. But thing they take from music. Though on your computer-you will hear it com music is simply a set of physical vibra both are far better musicians than I ever ing not from speakers but as iffi·om per tions that reach our eardrums; from was, singing and playing guitar and formers in the room itsel£ those vibrations we make the emotional piano, they have a more limited concep Many of us dream of the moment map of our lives. tion of larger forms, of the record's two when a glint-eyed scientist with a tiny Yet, as generations pass, the style sides, of the symphony's three or four box will do something amazing- tum and manner of those maps change. N ot parts, of the swell and structure of a can off all the lights in the city, or send us long ago, I realized that one of the great tata. It isn't a question of classical tastes back in time, or make us glow emerald changes in my lifetime involves the way against pop; it's a question ofsmall forms and fly. Choueiri is that man, and his we listen to music. fu a teen-ager, I was heard in motion against large forms box is that box. Outside his smaller lab 1 a fanatic record collector, hungry for old heard with solemn intent. "Sgt. Peppet ' is an office whose shelves are fi lled 32 THE NEW YOI\1\EI\. JANUAI\Y 28, 2013 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSEF ASTOR with those strange white dummy heads sion is music-Bach's Mass in B Minor which sound scientists love (though they is for him the "most beautiful thing ever look as impersonal as crash dummies, engineered"-and his dream is to try each one, I learned, was modeUed on a to reproduce its minute subtleties and specific head and given a nickname: thereby make sense of its mysteries. Carl, Philipp, Emanuel). Choueiri plugged in his box, which runs what he rosstalk is the core problem in cre calls his llACCii filter--the acronym also Cating three-dimensional illusions. stands for "Band-Assembled Crosstalk Essentially, we hear stereophonically Cancellation Hierarchy"- m1d Blue and see in depth because we have rwo toothed it to my iPhone. I chose the ears and two eyes. Information from Stones' "Beast ofBurden ," more or less your eyes or your ears arrives slightly at random, and there they were. I do not separated by the width ofyo ur nose or mean that the soundscape was wid the space of your head, and the brain, ened- ! mean that Keith Richards was using a variety of cues, computes the limping over to my left, licking at chords, distance berween the signals and re-cre and Ronnie Wood to the right, absent ates the three-dimensional space the mi ndedly smbbing away, as he does, and signals come from . (The Cyclops could Jagger in the middle nnd Charlie Warr:s nor watch a 3-D adventure movie about and Bill \/\lyman impassive to their rear. Odysseus and the Cyclops.) There are And what made this more amazing is three kinds of cues that your ears and that no one, as the track was recorded in brain use to locate sound in space, layers, over three months in 1977, had Choueiri says. There'si.TJ)., or"inter had any intention of re-creating the di aural time difference," which means mensional layout of the studio. how long it takes for the sound to arrive Choueiri belongs to a distinctly at one car rather than the other. LL.D., modern type: the engineer-aesthete. In or "inter- aural level diftere11Ce," means his Princeton house and in an apart the tiny differences in volume; the mem he has in Manhattan, on the Up sound of a lefi: speaker is very slightly per East Side, he disa-eedy displays col softer for the right ear than it is for the lections ofCub ist design, ceramic pipes, lefi: ear. And, finally, though not least and nonfigu•·ative Greek vases of the important, rhe•·e are the differences in Periclean period. He was brought up sound coloration- the tonality of the in Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, sound that you hem·, depending, in part, among the Antiochian Orthodox on th e shape of your pinnae, the curly much the most ancient of Christians, outer ears. the Antiochians look upon the Catho But the creation of three-dimen lics rather the v.tay Boston Episcopalians sional sound depends on each ear's hear look upon Appalachian snake hand ing only what it's supposed to hear. lers--and he \>vrites poetry in at least When you listen to your stereo speakers, two of h is many languages. Teased the right ear hears sound not just from about being an aesthete in the guise of the right channel, the sound intended an engineer, he might nod cryptically for it, but also from the left channel, the and, later that day, send a poem he sound intended for the left ear. The same wrote, several years ago, in French, a thing happens when you look at a flat rueful personal testament called, simply, representation of a three-dimensional "L'Esthete." He is also an adept in the space: the right eye sees what the left eye art of Zajal, an ancient Arabic fonn of is looking at. Cancelling the "crosstalk" freestyle rap in which rwo speakers de is the key to creating an illusion of bate a subject in impro"ised song, chant depth. It's easy to do with your eyes. ing back and forth in strict strophic "You just put a physical barrier between verse. (Many ofhis Zajal debates can be the two eyes, show each one a slightly found on YouTube, posted by hard different image, and, presto, you see in core Zajal fans.) Yet his passion for three dimensions," Choueiri explains. those fonns is mixed with a faith that The same principle holds for sound, beautiful things and sounds can be fully and the same solutions are in some ways understood, and even mechani7.ed, like possible. "To get binaural sound is not the plasma propulsion that makes a thar hard," Choueiri says. "You can do rocket move forward. His primary pas- crosstalk cancellation with a mattress! THE NEW 'rOI\KEI\. JAI\\!Am' 28. 2013 33 Really! Just place a mattress between XTC than anyone had previously that ofbeing in a concert hall on a good your two speakers, press your nose imagined possible, so that the signal afternoon, runs tl1rough your body.

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