There’s an interesting documentary on YouTube called The Art of Listening that I watched the other night that I thought I would share. It’s basically about all the work that goes into making music right from the stage of building instruments, an artist choosing theirs and then all the people involved in the process ending with the listener. For someone like me it was a fascinating watch and I loved it right up until the end where it started to sound like an ad for HD Audio formats and then I start to take issue with it a bit. I’ll explain why and then get to the documentary. Right now I’m going through the process of learning how to be an audio engineer, and I’m realizing how much goes on in a song that I’ve never heard before. Especially when it comes to EQ’ing, there is stuff I simply can’t hear, yet. I say yet because every day I seem to have “Ah ha! I hear it!!” moments as my ears are being trained as to what to listen for.  The average person however doesn’t care about that and I’m willing to bet would never care about the difference between an MP3 and a 96khz/24 bit HD Audio track. They care more about the style, lyrics, and music than the nuanced details of it.

That being said, I really want to emphasize that is a really small criticism that may be more of a personal bias. The focus of the documentary is the attention to detail that everyone participating puts into making making music, so logically that same attention to detail should be carried through to the end format so the listener can enjoy the piece the way it was intended to be heard. I encourage you to watch it because it is a beautiful film made by people who you can tell are passionate about music.