Hyper-awareness?

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Yes, I can see how that might be a problem, on the spectrum or not. Any finely tuned sense can lead to not just overload, but hyper-criticality, I suppose.

I actually have something very similar to this, but it is for aesthetics. I'm ruined for listening to music or enjoying it any more. That bar should always go after that bar, or not be repeated there, etc. etc.

I guess it's a different form of the same thing. I assume it is.

Being overly sensitive to sound or light might be a bit more debilitating in real life terms though, than just not being able to listen to certain types of music, etc.

Interesting. I never tied these things together before. I'll have to think about this one a bit more.

I suppose to be perfectionist about anything, you have to have a gift for noticing small deviations from the ideal.

Often I question my own criteria for excellence though, and I've been known to change them. What I've noticed over and over is that a recording can sound lousy to me when I first hear it, but over time that can change. I deliberately got away from studio recording and started performing live because the ability to finely control studio recording was too great. At first everything I did sounded awful to my ears, but eventually I got used to the new situation and it was as if my criteria of excellence had recalibrated themselves.


Yes, if sound or light itself is painful to experience, that's a lot worse than just being very picky about the finer points of music quality.

I understand where you are coming from with recalibrating. Mutate and survive. As much as possible.

I'm not really a perfectionist though. Some people don't know an out of tune vocal when they hear one, and when you demand 'one more take' - it's 'oh, so you're a perfectionist'. Not quite.

I don't mind sloppy playing or slightly out of tune, or muddy bass or lots of other things, but I have to draw the line at stuff that hurts, like harsh frequencies in the mid-range (around 1-2KHz) where a human's hearing is most sensitive. See Fletcher,Munson et al for more info. It's the same for eyesight. A human beings eyesight is more sensitive to green light than to any other colour (we needed to distinguish shapes in the grass trying to hunt and eat us is the rationale for this).

But I don't mind noise in music, and poor signal to noise ratios. I quite enjoy recording onto four track cassette (though I have the best model ever built - Akai Mg614 with DBX noise reduction), but the hiss levels and wow and flutter levels are diabolical compared to digital. So definitely not a purist or perfectionist here. The thing is with analogue tape is that all the really high frequencies are rolled of above about 12K which is where most musical information stops being transmitted anyway, though a young adult will hear up to 20KHz in theory, but very few do.

Anyway, I guess you don't even need to be hyper aware if there are nasty frequencies that hurt your ears, whether you are NT or not.

I never quite know whether I'm being too picky or not about pitching.


I tend to be a stickler for tight playing. I also like the bass to be clean, solid and punchy, possibly because that was something of a holy grail back in the 1960s as things moved towards close-miking and better equipment. I hate too much treble in the frequency range you mention, can't stand anything strident, I get "listener fatigue" pretty quickly with that, it feels like somebody's scraping my brain with a file.


I used to fight tooth and claw to keep the frequency response flat up to about 15kHz, and was pretty obsessional about keeping the hiss inaudible. I was rather disappointed that going digital didn't solve the hiss problem, I hadn't realised that the preamps had been generating almost as much hiss as the tape. It was also rather a shock to discover (after going digital) that tape often seems to improve the sound because of the way it compresses the HF, and that studios had begun to copy their digital recordings onto tape and back to digital again, just to get that improvement back. The objective perfection of digital turned out to be its main imperfection. Tape could overload, but the resulting distortion is much softer than digital clipping.


I suspect that a lot of people aren't particularly conscious of oversharpness and distortion in recordings, up to a point, but I think they still get the urge to turn the music off after a while, even though they don't know why.