What is changing?

[Banaticus]

I think there would be more acceptance of the changes made (or at least less arguing) if you were to go into more detail as to what is being changed.

With a minstrel skill, an old value might be "3 damage plus 5 dps for 2 seconds" and then a new value might be "4 damage plus 6 dps for 3 seconds" or whatever. And then people argue over whether that's too much or too little. Still, though, that's all they're arguing about, they aren't arguing over whether or not the change was to 4 initial damage or 40 initial damage or what.

So we're hearing that notes will be balanced or adjusted or whatever. That's really extremely vague and some people may build this up to be more than what it is. So, for the benefit of those who don't really understand what sound it, let's examine what sound is. First, a sound pressure wave is something vibrating and exerting pressure -- that's what sound is, something vibrating at particular speeds while producing particular pressure patterns.

PITCH
Pitch, or the difference between a "high note" and a "low note" is really frequency, or how quickly something is vibrating. Something vibrating back and forth super fast is high pitch and something vibrating back and forth very slowly is low pitch.
"I thought it was size, the small strings on a guitar make a higher pitch?" No, the small strings are tightened more which makes them vibrate less, resulting in a smaller pitch. They're smaller because it takes less force to get that thinner string to a higher level of tighness, and even if you did get a thicker string to that level of tightness there'd be too much material to vibrate that quickly.
"So why use thicker strings on the low notes? Why not use the same small strings for each note on a guitar?" It's a cheat to fit the strings into roughly the same space -- if all the strings were exactly the same size, the low-note strings would have to be much, much longer than they are.
"But the higher strings are longer on a guitar!"
I told you, they're cheating by making the lower-note strings thicker -- the actual size is not a good representation for what the true size would have to be if the strings were basically all the same material. See a harp for a good visual of that.

So, that's pitch, faster vibration is faster pitch, lower vibration is lower pitch. Vibration is measured in hertz, or kilohertz or megahertz, because again nobody likes super large numbers.

LOUDNESS
So sound is something vibrating back and forth. Obviously if Optimus Prime was waving Megatron back and forth twice a second, this would produce a far larger pressure wave than me waving a cloth flag back and forth twice a second. Anything that vibrates produces pressure waves and these pressure waves are independant of the pitch. These pressure waves are initially measured in something like pascals, which results in a scale of 1 (slightest whisper that anyone could possibly hear) to ten million (bleading ears) but nobody likes super large numbers, so we convert it into a logarithmic scale called decibels, so that we can talk instead about a scale that only goes from 1 to 140 or so. But hold on for a moment because that's not the whole story.

The human ear hears different pitches of sound differently. Take the sky and it's colors for a moment. You know the color scale, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet (they threw out indigo because it was a rubbish color -- honestly, what's indigo). Well, during a sunrise/sunset with lots of atmospheric scattering from weather/smog/ or just a ton of atmosphere between you and the sun (it shoots through the atmosphere on the top side of the planet then skims along just above the ground through all that extra atmosphere to get to you just before it sets below the horizon), you're only going to see red and colors close to it, while during the day when the sun is only shining through the regular thickness of a single atmosphere with possibly no weather, you get all the colors and see all the scattering from the sunrise/sunset that's happening elsewhere around the globe as a blue sky. So why isn't the normal sky violet? Because your eyes see blue 2-3 times better than they see violet. There's more violet in the sky, but we see blue so well that it's just drowned out in the optic signal that our eyes receive. The same thing happens with sound -- your ears are far more sensitive to certain pitches of sound.

"Yeah, I understand, it makes sense when you think of what pitch is. If one sound source is vibrating twice as fast as the other, and they're both producing the same relative pressure wave, 100 pulses of 80 pressure are going to be felt/heard more than 50 pulses of 80 pressure, right? So you're more sensitive to higher pitches."
Not really. You're basically more sensitive to higher pitches, for normal hearing stuff, but super-high stuff requires more pressure for a human to hear it and super-low stuff actually takes an even higher pressure for you to hear it. The sweet spot, that you can hear the most, is from about 2 kH to about 4kH.

This produces what are called "sound pressure levels" (dB SPL) or measurements of the perceived loudness of a sound relative to its pitch. There's a sound pressure level for low-pressure sounds (A-weighting), a sound pressure level for medium-pressure sounds (B-weighting), and a sound pressure level for high-pressure sounds (C-weighting). But, the A weighting is far more commonly used -- most of the sound pressure levels that you see when you look up "how loud is my washing machine or an electric guitar or my crying baby sister or whatever" are reported as A-weighted sound. (dB SPL_a)

So, whenever we're talking about matching sounds, we're really talking about comparing apples with oranges. We can't really talk about the loudness of anything unless we've established its pitch (frequency) and its pressure wave (decibel) and assigned it to a particular weighting so that we can really compare two different things in a roughly similar manner. Yes, oranges and apples are both basically round, they're both basically delicious, see we're finding points of commonality already! Plus most things are reported in A-weightings anyway. There's going to be things that are off, but it's close enough for government work!

So these different sound levels and the curvy "how well can humans perceive this particular frequency (pitch) at this particular decibel (pressure)" graphs led someone to come up with the "hearing level" graph (dB HL). The hearing level graph is a flat line. If you have a hearing test and you fall below that line anywhere, you have a hearing problem in that particular range.

What's changing again?
So, now we come to the crucial question. What exactly is being adjusted when we hear that loudness is being adjusted? Because depending on what weighting we're talking about and how much sound the computer speaker is putting out, we could be talking about different things. And it's possible that the relative scale on different computers is different -- I don't know, but I do know that on some of my computers "loud" (all the way up) is not as "loud" (all the way up) as other computers.

How is this loudness being tested/determined? Is the sound being piped through an occluded ear simulator or a 2 cc coupler?

How is the loudness of different notes being measured and adjusted?

Also, currently every LOTRO instrument has three octaves. Most should have more, in my opinion, but that's what we have. Regarding the following scales, are these scales changing? These are the real-life notes for particular instruments.

[SchorschiSchrumpf]

This produces what are called "sound pressure levels" (dB SPL) or measurements of the perceived loudness of a sound relative to its pitch. There's a sound pressure level for low-pressure sounds (A-weighting), a sound pressure level for medium-pressure sounds (B-weighting), and a sound pressure level for high-pressure sounds (C-weighting). But, the A weighting is far more commonly used -- most of the sound pressure levels that you see when you look up "how loud is my washing machine or an electric guitar or my crying baby sister or whatever" are reported as A-weighted sound. (dB SPL_a)

So, whenever we're talking about matching sounds, we're really talking about comparing apples with oranges. We can't really talk about the loudness of anything unless we've established its pitch (frequency) and its pressure wave (decibel) and assigned it to a particular weighting so that we can really compare two different things in a roughly similar manner.

I guess the integral over the spectrum in a range of 10 to 10k Hz of a tone multiplied by the A-weighting would be a good start. To make it comparable it would also have to be divided by the length of the tone. This way the overtone spectra would contribute to the perceived volume (which they do in reality).