Playing with Harman's "How to Listen"

[Daniel Postilnik]

I finally got Harman's listener training software installed and gave it a try, focusing on band identification, with both boosts and cuts. I did 100 practice runs with the Tom Waits cover song, starting at level 4 (for a total of 8 possible answers to choose from each time). My score was around 53%.

This seemed like a pretty lousy score, and it made me wonder if I need to totally re-evaluate my abilities as a live sound engineer. However, there were some patterns in my results that aren't really accounted for in the score.

First of all, about 90% of the time when I made mistakes, I correctly identified whether it was a boost or dip, and I was also within one or two bands of the correct one.

Second of all, the score is not weighted to reflect how many bands the listener is choosing from. Making a mistake when you have two boosts and two cuts to choose from is not the same as making a mistake when you have nine boosts and nine cuts to choose from.

Does anyone have thoughts about how one's results in this program correlate to live engineering ability? I would like to conclude that I'm not in the wrong field entirely...

 

[Jordan Wolf]

Re: Playing with Harman's "How to Listen"

My mistakes were very similar to your own...when I was wrong, I was right next to the "correct" one. I don't think you need to change careers (although you'll make more money that way), but you may want to change your view of this software.

It's not a final test of your abilities (that's showtime, right?). It's an evaluation of your current abilities and shows you where you need to improve. The program focuses on audible subtleties that often get lost in sound reinforcement, but the skills can definitely benefit us.