# Noise on CDs that you like



## Polednice

I read a blog post by someone saying how the sound of intense breathing over a performance added an extra, enjoyable dimension to the piece. I can imagine that, but I wouldn't like much of it.

Are there (m)any non-musical sounds that you like? I hate applause, and I hate the creaking of chairs. Coughing is, of course, the worst. Actually, no, the worst is when the conductor or performer sings along. _That_ should be a sackable offence!


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## Sid James

I'm not too worried about these things. & I do like applause at the end. I don't mind if they edit it out though. Life is too short to worry about these things.

Sometimes these extra sounds can become part of the music, in an odd way.

When I was a kid, my parents had a vinyl of a Liszt piece, and during that piece something fell down. It might have been a music stand, something in the studio, or maybe a musician dropping his bow, couldn't tell. Anyway, something of the sort. But it happened at a point in the piece that made me think it was how Liszt wanted it, that he wrote it into the piece. It's the only recording my parents had of the work (it was an orchestral work, forget which one).

Anyway, later listening to other recordings of this piece, I found out that the "extra" noise was absent. Funnily even now, I imagine that extra noise in the work when I hear it. It's either one of his Hungarian Rhapsodies or tone poems. The coincidental noise has lodged in my mind and I see it as a part of the work. But I'm not bothered by it, it's kind of CAgean and funny...


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde

I like the applause on live recordings and _sometimes_ even the coughing if it is done at the right time. It gives a certain something to the recording that you don't get in studio recordings where there is no audience.


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## Sid James

Polednice said:


> ...Actually, no, the worst is when the conductor or performer sings along. _That_ should be a sackable offence!


You must dislike recordings of Thomas Beecham and Glenn Gould then, I take it as you're suggesting that? :lol:

Two of my favourite performers, Beecham especially for resurrecting Bizet's _Symphony in C_ which is a favourite, & also his embracing of light classics, "classical lollipops" as he called them.

But I think Beecham was more of a grunter than sing-alonger, and Mr. Gould was kind of both, although it's been a while since I've listened to a recording by him (but last year just got his second _Goldbergs _account, still have to listen to that)...


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## Polednice

Gould certainly. I wasn't thinking of Beecham, but of some other more recent conductor who I can't remember.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde

Polednice said:


> Gould certainly. I wasn't thinking of Beecham, but of some other more recent conductor who I can't remember.


What???? How could you _not_ love Glenn Gould's recordings?????


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## Sid James

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> What???? How could you _not_ love Glenn Gould's recordings?????


Well his grunting can be off-putting a bit. But for me, after a while my brain filtered out the extraneous noises. That's kind of how the brain works. In our city living today, we often listen to music with heaps of background noise. Traffic, the neighbor mowing the lawn, his dog barking, planes flying overheard, etc. But your brain concentrates on the music coming from your stereo. It's selective listening, filtering out the cr*p...


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde

Sid James said:


> Well his grunting can be off-putting a bit. But for me, after a while my brain filtered out the extraneous noises. That's kind of how the brain works. In our city living today, we often listen to music with heaps of background noise. Traffic, the neighbor mowing the lawn, his dog barking, planes flying overheard, etc. But your brain concentrates on the music coming from your stereo. It's selective listening, filtering out the cr*p...


Well I like it when you get those noises from Glenn Gould because then you seem to get more of an awareness that you are listening to a human being playing the piano rather than just the music and the piano. It is the music and the piano and the musician. Now if only the noises of the composer were on the recordings as well...


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## elgar's ghost

I'm not too keen on audible footstamping during the playing of those chamber works of the more intimate variety - footstamping should be restricted to the likes of John Lee Hooker when he's letting rip on his Epiphone while singing Ground Hog Blues. Why can't the musicians have rugs under their feet to muffle the thump if the floor is made of a resonant surface?


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## Sid James

^^I think Bartok "wrote in" a footstamp or two into the _Divertimento for Strings_, but I think it's optional, in most performances I've heard, they don't do it (& I quite liked it)...


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## Vaneyes

I wouldn't mind hearing an orchestra tuning.






Just kidding.


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## mmsbls

The only noise that I enjoy on my music CDs is the music. I especially do not like applause - I bought the CD to hear the music and not the audience. Martha Argerich has many live CDs (I may not own a recording of hers that is not live), and as much as I like Martha, I dislike the applause ending each work. I generally don't hear Gould on his recordings, but when I do, it's hard not to hear him (and that can be rather unpleasant).


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## Sid James

My parents said they liked the snaps and pops on the ancient recordings, said they gave it character. I don't know if I agree or not with that but in terms of remastering, I'd rather have some residue of surface noise on ancient recordings rather than the restorers totally whiping it out and producing over-remastered recording. If it's ancient, there's no sin in it sounding ancient, it's hard to hide the age of a recording that's from before eg. 1945.

I had a great recording, the premiere performance, of Bartok's _Violin Concerto #2, _with Zoltan Szekely playing it live in Amsterdam in 1939 (this was the violinist who commissioned the work). It was full of surface noise, even when remastered quite well, but that recording was magical. & it had clapping which added to the workings of that magic on me. I don't much care for that work now, but I really loved that recording...


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## Kopachris

I actually like a little applause at the beginning and/or end, though if it's excessive, I'll usually skip over it after a few seconds. As with CoAG, I don't mind a little cough if it's done at the right time. I also actually like to hear the orchestra tuning before a piece or movement--in a way, it fills me with anticipation. The one thing I can't stand is a sterile sound. I hate recordings which were made in a studio and are too perfectly mixed. I prefer my recordings to sound a little more... organic. I've found the recordings on the Peabody Symphony Orchestra and Peabody Concert Orchestra's website to usually be just right.


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## Polednice

With regards to applause, I have two problems, otherwise fine:

1) If it overlaps with the start or end of a piece.
2) If it is much louder than the music, such that it's painful.


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## Vaneyes

My listening tastes are rarely affected, since I rarely buy historic recordings. In modern instances, most of the time the producers and recording engineers have been very considerate of the listener by splicing in fresh segments of the same work from another performance.

I have not much tolerance, maybe I should say none, for coughing of any size. Sickies should stay home, or risk being spliced.


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## Sid James

^^Man, I really did not need to see that! :lol: Totally freaky.

Anyway, I don't mind it on record that much, but when I am at a live concert, I don't like it if a person who is obviously sick (eg. with a persistent cough) comes to the concert when they should have stayed home.

It happened once last year, a person behind me coughing quite a bit, and it was quite annoying. It could have been worse, maybe it wasn't that bad, but when I am there, it peeves me off to no end.

The worst thing is when very ignorant and rude people leave their mobile phones on. Or even worse, answer it. Maybe another issue. Let's not go there.

There was a notorious performance here of a quiet piece, I think the_ Enchanted Lake _(is it by Liadov?) and there was coughing right the way through it. The music was apparently inaudible. I forget, it was a long time ago, but my memory is that the piece had to be repeated for recording/broadcast purposes. It was reported in the newspapers the next day, probably in the gossip section, which doesn't happen very often with classical concerts.

Here are two quotes speaking to this -

"I know two kinds of audience only - one coughing and one not coughing" - *Artur Schnabel.*

"I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing would increase, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order. In one concert the coughing was so violent I played only ten variations (out of twenty)." - *Sergei Rachmaninov. *

[Source - Sydney Symphony pdf of 2010 season]


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## kv466

I like humming over piano and a good, creaking chair; over impeccable keyboards, of course.


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## beethovenian

Paul Lewis humming, I dun mind.
Slight cough here and there in live recording, I can take.

But the loud applause that comes barely seconds( i like my few seconds of silence!)after a soft and quiet end of the music and seemingly goes on forever just ticks off my nerves. I would have personally cut off the applause noise with some music editing software but I am just too lazy. Guess I will continue being angry ..... And lazy. It's pathetic I know.


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## LordBlackudder

theres a recording of moonlight 3rd movement by jeno jando and it has a clash of high pitch notes. not sure why only this one has it. but sounds like something was broken.


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## mleghorn

Some of Colin Davis' recordings are difficult to listen to because his singing is so loud (and unmusical). I can hear Alfred Brendel grunting in a lot of his piano solo recordings (especially Schubert sonatas).


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## Jeremy Marchant

Without being nerdy, I think that a good hifi will make extraneous noises much more acceptable because it is able to integrate them into the overall sound picture better. Good doesn't have to mean expensive, though its unlikely to be cheap: try listening on Linn or Naim equipment.


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## quack

Yes nothing like high fidelity coughs to get a good depiction of someone's lungs. Although I do agree that a poor recording and playback tends to flatten the sound making coughs part of the piece whereas a good system can produce a sound stage and make you feel part of the audience murmur rather than a listener to a recording.

I remember hearing the swish of score pages at the end of a poignant passage that seemed a good concluding noise but mostly extra noise annoys. Grunting cellists particularly.


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## Itullian

the live Bayreuth stuff, if not too bad.


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## bassClef

I like the slight crackle and hiss you hear on Bernstein's 1958 rendition of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring - it adds to the rawness, the power and clarity of the piece is not diminished in the slightest - it's still up there among the best recordings of this landmark piece to this day (possibly THE best). I'm happy they didn't try to remove this on the transfer to CD - they may have taken the edge off the finer detail.


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## Rangstrom

Hearing the prompter on live recordings is my bête noir.


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## regressivetransphobe

All of it. Humans make noises, and no media is perfect. If I am listening to media of a human playing music, I don't discount the possibility of some noises.


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## ZombieBeethoven

I vaguely remember that a cat made an unplanned appearance in one the Wagner Ring cycles. I can't remember for sure which one. It made my wife quite happy to come across it.


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## GrosseFugue

I don't mind hearing Glenn Gould hum, sing and eat a ham sandwich with a glass of beer. No, seriously, I think his sounds add a kind of charm to it. I probably wouldn't tolerate it from anyone else. It's just something about him and the way he plays makes it alright. Last thing I would want is a Glenn Gould De-Vocalizer 2000: http://www.davegrossman.net/gould/ Check it out! It's hilarious! Listen to the "Before" and "After" tracks.


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## bigshot

There's a recording in New York where a subway train rumbles through underground during a quiet passage.


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## science

I think Celibidache believed strongly that such noises are part of the music. But then, he was crazy. 

I don't mind the crackling of old taped music, it's kind of romantic; but I prefer modern, cleaner sound most of the time. I'm against coughing, and I usually don't buy live recordings because I don't want to hear it.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde

science said:


> I think Celibidache believed strongly that such noises are part of the music. But then, he was crazy.
> 
> I don't mind the crackling of old taped music, it's kind of romantic; but I prefer modern, cleaner sound most of the time. I'm against coughing, and I usually don't buy live recordings because I don't want to hear it.


This is a live recording of the Beethoven complete string quartets. I haven't heard it, but from the review I gather it has no coughing at all and could possibly be mistaken for a studio recording.


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## ksargent

I like live recordings, so applause is not a problem. As far as audible breathing goes, I like it when the recording picks up the collective breath a string quartet takes before it begins. 

Ken


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## wijnands

I've got the 4 seasons by Janine Jansen, on the winter you clearly hear her bow hitting the strings, I quite like that.

I've also got a jazz album, Diana Krall's "Live in Paris" where on "east of the sun" there's an applaus halfway in the track. With good equipment you can just hear someone whistling on his fingers all the way at the back of the audience.


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