Clarification of Panning Please!

D

darkecho

New member
ok, so i know that when using a pan pot, or software, say you have a track of guitar, and a track of vocals

if you pan the guitar 100% left, and the vocals 100% right, the guitar will be the only things coming out of the left speaker and the vocals will be hte only thing coming out of the right speaker.

if you have the vocals not panned at all, then it will seem as though the vocals are coming from down the center (between the two speakers where there isnt a speaker) and is being split 50% into each speaker.


so I dont understand how panning somehting "out of the way" of something else actually works, because you are just adjusting the volumes of the tracks in each speaker, right?

you arent actually moving a sound out of the way, you are just adjusting its relative volume between two speakers right?


or is the Pan pot a physical representation of our psycho-acoustic mind hearing soething that physically isnt happening...

like as you pan a signal from left to right, it appears to be moving in a linear fashion from your left side to your right side, when really the volume in the left is simply dropping as the volume in the right is increasing...

so can your mind place the sounds that it hears as if they were spread in a linear fashion over say a 180degree arc?
 
darkecho said:
so can your mind place the sounds that it hears as if they were spread in a linear fashion over say a 180degree arc?
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Well, you answered your own question in your post. If it "seems" to be moving, then your mind IS perceiving it that way.
 
And keep in mind, we don't have 360 degree ears around our head; we only have a left and a right ear. Our brain picks up that a sound is somewhat picked up in one ear, but moreso in the other ear, so its location must be off to the side a bit or whatever. Think of the speakers as interfacing directly with your ears. Similarly, you can think of a stereo pair of microphones as being an extension of our ears, only you can stretch them apart at different angles than just what we are capable of doing with the ears on our head.
 
darkecho said:
like as you pan a signal from left to right, it appears to be moving in a linear fashion from your left side to your right side, when really the volume in the left is simply dropping as the volume in the right is increasing...

so can your mind place the sounds that it hears as if they were spread in a linear fashion over say a 180degree arc?
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Not quite 180 degrees - just the arc between the speakers (unless you resort to other trickery).

When you're mixing you should try to think where you want the instrument to appear to "come from" and then adjust the pan until it does. Depending on factors such as other instruments and any reverb/echo you've added, the placing of the image doesn't always coincide with the exact position of the pan so use your ears, not your eyes.
 
ok ok... for some reason this is a concept my mind doesnt want to grasp.. but for the time being I think i have it figured out...

so what is this business of panning things out of the way of each other? is it just somehow seperating the frequecies so that the mind can hear it better?

im not understanding how you can pan something out of the way of something else if it is just adjusting volumes...

unless the psychoacoustics is influencing how we hear it.
 
darkecho said:
im not understanding how you can pan something out of the way of something else if it is just adjusting volumes...
Click to expand...


just like how at a party you try and talk louder than the people around you so that your buddy can hear you over the rest. The volume of an instrument (and the frequencies that make up that volume) can mask other frequencies. So if you pan it to a different place (bringing the volume down in one of the channels of that sound), it makes room for the frequencies of the other instrument to be brought out.
 
darkecho said:
so what is this business of panning things out of the way of each other? is it just somehow seperating the frequecies so that the mind can hear it better?
Click to expand...
It's not so much seperating the frequencies as it is simply seperating the apparent source or location of the sound. It's no more complicated than that.

This is, in fact not as important when the frequencies generally differ so much as when they are the same. Here are a couple of examples:

1. Lets say if you have two guitars of similar but not identical tone and timbre and you have them playing complimentary but not necessarily identical parts. Pan them to the same location and it'll sound more like a mosh of guitar sound. It may possibly sound OK, but more likely than not the detail of each guitar's line will be somewhat masked by the other. The attack of one guitar will be stepping over the decay of another when syncopated, and the tone of the two guitars will blend and fight with each other when not.

Pan the two guitars apart, OTOH, (it doesn't *have* to be full L/R pan, just enough to allow the ear to seperate the sources spacially), and you now hear two seperate and distinct guitars that are not stepping on each other but rather are now recognizable as two guitarisis in a bluegrass band doing a wonderful job of playing off of each other.

2. You have a guitar and a piano both playing at the same time and sharing many of the same formant frequencies and and timbre characteristics. Pan them together. The guitar has to fight the piano to be heard in the same frequency areas that the piano is occupying, and vice versa. Seperate them physically via pan and they now have their own "space" and the ear has no prouble seperating them and hearing their distinct characters.

Don't get too hung up on the mechanism of pan and the sending different volumes through only two speakers. While all that is true, it's not really the point for this question. Look at it this way:

Someone figured out that a full sound field can be *synthesized* using only two speakers and then modulating volumes between those speakers to create a synthetic "image" of at least a 2-D, and in limited ways, 3-D soundscape between those speakers. When you turn you pan control 30° R, you're simply programming the stereo image "synthesizer" to make it sound to your brain via your ears like that sound source is 30° to the right. Yes, it's a psychoacoustic effect. There's not really a speaker or an instrument at that location.

The fact that all the sounds are still just coming out of the two speakers is irrelevant to your ears/brain at that point. As far as your head is concerned, there *is* an instrument at 30°; that's the auditory "reality" as your head is perceiving it. Therefore panning - and more to the point, mixing - the signal to follow that "perceived reality" is what actually works and is important, not the real physical, mechanical reality of two loudspeakers delivering all the sound.

Another analogy that may help is when you are setting up lighting and camera angles and all that stuff to film a video for playback on a TV monitor, do you care how the video monitor does it's job? Do you care that the video monitor can only reproduce three colors, red green and blue? Nope. You just trust that the viewers' eyes and brains will translate those dots into the proper colors flesh tone or sunset colors, even though those millions of different colors themselves don't actually exist on the the video monitor. It's just a psychovisual effect. Same thing with stereo audio and panning. Don't woory about the two speakers any more than you worry about the three colors on a video screen. Just trust that the equipment will synthesize reality OK for your head.

G.
 
i think the answer came out in the first few posts.

i mean...how would it "make sense" to you? if you had 15 speakers in front of you at different angles?

Doesn't matter since all that sound still just goes to 2 different places. your left ear and you right ear.

your ears don't just put the sound in 2 places. the pan knob does give an accurate representation of where we hear the sound, even though, yes, it's just adjusting volume levels.
 
ok, so basically youre telling me to forget about the whole 2 spearker/volume thing

and telling me that I should just look at it as in, "if it sounds like that sound moved 4 inches to the right, it did".

so if I have what appears to be two sounds overlapping, i pan them till they sound like they arent and that is how I use panning.

ok i think i got it.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
It's not so much seperating the frequencies as it is simply seperating the apparent source or location of the sound. It's no more complicated than that.

This is, in fact not as important when the frequencies generally differ so much as when they are the same. Here are a couple of examples:

1. Lets say if you have two guitars of similar but not identical tone and timbre and you have them playing complimentary but not necessarily identical parts. Pan them to the same location and it'll sound more like a mosh of guitar sound. It may possibly sound OK, but more likely than not the detail of each guitar's line will be somewhat masked by the other. The attack of one guitar will be stepping over the decay of another when syncopated, and the tone of the two guitars will blend and fight with each other when not.

Pan the two guitars apart, OTOH, (it doesn't *have* to be full L/R pan, just enough to allow the ear to seperate the sources spacially), and you now hear two seperate and distinct guitars that are not stepping on each other but rather are now recognizable as two guitarisis in a bluegrass band doing a wonderful job of playing off of each other.

2. You have a guitar and a piano both playing at the same time and sharing many of the same formant frequencies and and timbre characteristics. Pan them together. The guitar has to fight the piano to be heard in the same frequency areas that the piano is occupying, and vice versa. Seperate them physically via pan and they now have their own "space" and the ear has no prouble seperating them and hearing their distinct characters.

Don't get too hung up on the mechanism of pan and the sending different volumes through only two speakers. While all that is true, it's not really the point for this question. Look at it this way:

Someone figured out that a full sound field can be *synthesized* using only two speakers and then modulating volumes between those speakers to create a synthetic "image" of at least a 2-D, and in limited ways, 3-D soundscape between those speakers. When you turn you pan control 30° R, you're simply programming the stereo image "synthesizer" to make it sound to your brain via your ears like that sound source is 30° to the right. Yes, it's a psychoacoustic effect. There's not really a speaker or an instrument at that location.

The fact that all the sounds are still just coming out of the two speakers is irrelevant to your ears/brain at that point. As far as your head is concerned, there *is* an instrument at 30°; that's the auditory "reality" as your head is perceiving it. Therefore panning - and more to the point, mixing - the signal to follow that "perceived reality" is what actually works and is important, not the real physical, mechanical reality of two loudspeakers delivering all the sound.

Another analogy that may help is when you are setting up lighting and camera angles and all that stuff to film a video for playback on a TV monitor, do you care how the video monitor does it's job? Do you care that the video monitor can only reproduce three colors, red green and blue? Nope. You just trust that the viewers' eyes and brains will translate those dots into the proper colors flesh tone or sunset colors, even though those millions of different colors themselves don't actually exist on the the video monitor. It's just a psychovisual effect. Same thing with stereo audio and panning. Don't woory about the two speakers any more than you worry about the three colors on a video screen. Just trust that the equipment will synthesize reality OK for your head.

G.
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OK Glen. In the light of that, do you hear "ghost mono" or dont you? Does it sound different to panned centre or doesnt it?

Tim
 
Tim Gillett said:
OK Glen. In the light of that, do you hear "ghost mono" or dont you? Does it sound different to panned centre or doesnt it?

Tim
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*sigh* Asked and answered a couple of times in that other thread, Tim.

To the first question, of course you hear it. By definition, anything not hard-panned to a single speaker is a "ghost" image, as I was just explaining above. It's a synthetic image. A center-panned mono track technically creates a "ghost image".

Now, as to if, when, and why that synthetic image behaves differently in a heavy mix if you have a single mono track center panned versus dual seperate mono tracks individually panned to the sides (what has been called a "ghosted center" or "ghost mono" by others before I picked up the term), I can only say this one more time:

If? I have heard it myself. I have used it myself. It can happen.

When? It certainly does not appear - either to instruments or to the ear - in simple mono signal comparisons. In a very thick mix where the soundstage is already quite crowded is where it seems to work the best, or at all, for that matter. It's not something that's sure-fire, but when it appears, there is indeed an audible difference.

Why? I have no idea. I agree that the statement does not match the simple theory. And the fact that simple expirimentation with mono signals shows the results between the two center-generating methods to have identical results. Have the center-panning laws had something to do with it, and I just fooled myslef beciase of the 3dB volume difference? I'll admit that is a possibility, but I stand by the contention that simple track level adjustments (to make up for any simple 3dB volume discrepencies) did not seem to yield quite the same sound.

I'm sorry I ever brought it up in that other thread to be honest with you, Tim. But while I'm sorry for bringing it up at all, I'm not sorry for what it was that I brought up. I stand by my statements. And I really don't want to argue them, because I can't.

Let's not drag that thread over to this one. If you all want to just consider me wrong on this, I can live with that. I'd rather have that than to continuing arguing back and forth.

But none of that changes the response to this thread and the guy that just can't wrap his head around how stereo works.

G.
 
Ok... interesting thread. Just by messing with the pan (by you guys saying is basically changing volumes), I concluded (which I might be really wrong), is that since you changing volumes of left and right by panning, the sound (Left) hits the ear with a lower amplitude, so you perceive it to be not as 'close' or not as 'direct', and the Right which say is panned 2'oclock, hits the ear with a higher amplitude but not quite center, basically fools the brain to thinking it's coming from X direction. And that just by panning your effecting perception of space, direct sound, reflections, reverberation (or did I just loose it completely? I'm trying to gather what I've learned about sound itself, and piece together what does what if you know what I mean.
 
basically i leanrned to stop caring HOW it works and just assume that it is doing exactly what my ears are telling me that its doing.



so basically, you dont want to know how panning works, just do what it tells you.
 
I don't *think* its a matter of being 'closer'. I think its that you have two ears, and the relative volume between those ears, along with early reflections, tells you where the source is.
 
Mindset said:
since you changing volumes of left and right by panning, the sound (Left) hits the ear with a lower amplitude, so you perceive it to be not as 'close' or not as 'direct', and the Right which say is panned 2'oclock, hits the ear with a higher amplitude but not quite center, basically fools the brain to thinking it's coming from X direction.
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That's more or less correct, though "closer" in this context would mean "closer" to one ear than the other. Think of it this way, perhaps:

The key is the fact that we use two ears. We can determine the location of a natural sound (e.g. a rock hitting the ground) because the volume of that sound hits our two ears at different volumes and slightly different times. Our brain is wired to automatically caclulate those differences to determine the direction from which the sound is coming. This cannot be done with only one ear.

Stereo panning and delays use this human capability to their advantage. By using two sound sources (two loudspeakers) to synthesize or replicate the volume and timing differences that the ear would otherwise hear from a point source somehwere in between those two speakers, it "tricks" the brain into thinking that middling location is indeed where the sound is coming from.

EDIT: Note that panning does not effect timing at all. It is only working on the property of volume. Timing/delay is controlled by other devices.

Mindset said:
And that just by panning your effecting perception of space, direct sound, reflections, reverberation (or did I just loose it completely?
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Well, that's taking it a bit too far; there's much more than just panning involved in all that.

As mentioned above, there's also issues of timing, which are major. Combinations of volume/panning and timing go a long way to recreating the acoustics of nature, but there's yet another factor as well: frequency. Different frequencies propigate and reflect differently; e.g. the higher the frequency, the more "pinpoint" and directional it tends to act or be perceived, the lower the frequency, the more energy it takes for to to be perceived as loud, and so forth (those are just two generalized examples.) Think of a classic echo in an echo canyon or something like that. If you scream, "ECHO!", you typically will hear someling come back like, "ECHO...EchO...echO...O...o...". What parts of the word you hear at given loudnesses varies not only on the original volume but on the forequencies of the different sounds in the word itself. Similar with common reverberation, which tends to de-emphasize the higher frequencies somewhat (depending upon the exact reverberation parameters, this can change.)

So it not only pan/volume, but also timing/delay, and frequency; all play a part in the perception of aural space and dimension, whether in the natural world or in a stereo re-creation of it.

G.
 
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Hi Glen,

Is there an in depth thread that you have created that gets into not only panning but also how the delays work with panning?

I'm starting to think I need more of that info, but there is so much junk out there I'm not sure where to start.

Thanks!
 
earlwgreen said:
Is there an in depth thread that you have created that gets into not only panning but also how the delays work with panning?
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Nothing that I've created (yet) that I can remember, but there is a wealth of information available on the internet and in the bookstores. Do some searching on "Haas effect", "precedence effect" (sp?), "delay psychoacoutics", etc. Also look up the "Mixing Engineer's Handbook" by Bobby Owsinski and "Modern Reccording Techniques" by Huber and Runstein. You can search the contents of at least one of those at Amazon.com, but it's much easier (IMHO) to head up to Borders bookstore and check out the hardcopy. There's also probably a good half-dozen other decent books in that same section that'll talk about this subject to one degree or another.

In the Huber & Runstein book, though, check out Chapter 2: Sound and Hearing, which goes in depth on many realted subtopics, but the subtopics "Perception of Direction" and "Perception of Space" are probably the ones most on target to your question.

G.
 
darkecho said:
or is the Pan pot a physical representation of our psycho-acoustic mind hearing something that physically isnt happening...
Click to expand...

OU812? I'm still waiting for those flashbacks they promised us in those propaganda films. :D
 
who said you can hear 360º??

i would beg do differ, slightly anyway. i can hear when someone is talking behind me, and that is being transferred through the only two ears i have. but i guess that is one of the abilities that a human has that we really haven't recreated just yet.
 
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