Classy graphic equalizer
This classy HiFi equipment that I encountered yesterday on the street made me think about the importance, at a certain point in time, of revealing certain technical characteristic. The presence of the graphic equalizer displayed on the device definitely gives some cachet and might have created some interesting conversations by users.
Revealing this sort of information is also intriguing as most users (in general perhaps not the target group of that device in its time) are not always versed in the art of tuning equalization. Perhaps the aesthetical effect is more fascinating; I remember a friend who use to like the representation of equalizer on his device as it looked “futuristic”: are mathematical visualization still classy now?
August 28th, 2008 at 9:28 am
It reminds me another intriguing phenomenon about graphical equalizers I encountered while learning to masterize and pre-masterize music. Real professionals can use just their ears as modality to efficiently equalize a piece of music. However newbies (like me at that time) can really take benefit of a graphical “translation” to do the job when our ears are not good and experienced enough. Translating from one under-trained sensory modality (audition) to another (visual perception) does help laypersons to do stuff they are not expert in yet.
The same analogy also stands for the oenologists and parfum-makers (nez) that often use multimodal metaphors to express smells and flavors. Our culture of some of the sensory channels are really poorer than others and as for learning a new language, a beginning step is to translate it to a language we already know in a richer manner.