Psychoacoustics
A quiet sound next to a loud one at a similar pitch simply disappears. Not quieter, gone. That is masking, and it is one of several places where your ears report something different from what a microphone would.
- masking
- loudness curves
- you hear a version, not a recording
Where you run into this
- Mixing
- Production
- Streaming
- Hearing science
In short
The inner ear sorts frequencies by position, and a loud sound occupies its region and some of the neighbourhood. Anything quiet inside that neighbourhood never reaches your awareness. Move the quiet tone far enough away in pitch and it reappears immediately, at the same volume it always had. The same principle underlies audio compression: an encoder can discard what would be masked anyway.
Masking is the effect that changes how people mix music. Once you hear a sound disappear rather than fade, the idea that every instrument needs its own frequency space stops being an opinion.
How it works
Psychoacoustics explains why loudness is not volume, why bass needs more energy to sound equally loud, and why a mix that sounds balanced loud can sound thin when quiet.
Where you run into this
- A vocal that vanishes when the guitars come in, without anything getting quieter
- A streaming codec discarding data you were never going to hear
- A mix that falls apart at low volume, because the bass needed the level
Our own examples
Three demos: a quiet tone on its own, the same tone beside a loud neighbour, and the same pair moved two octaves apart so the quiet tone comes back. All synthesis, so nothing is hidden in a recording.