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THE “NATURAL AND OPEN” CANADIAN SOUND: INSPIRED BY NATURE

In 1974, Paul met Dr. Floyd Toole, a world renowned psychoacoustician at the NRC, who conducted numerous studies to understand how sounds were interpreted by the human sense of hearing at both the psychological and physiological levels. To Paul, who had devoted much of his childhood to become an accomplished violinist, it was a “Eureka” moment. He had long puzzled over how to consistently reproduce on a set of speakers the unique timbres of different violins exactly as they would sound to him when he played them.

What Paul immediately recognised upon listening to Dr. Toole describe his research was that his findings gave him the formula he needed to design speakers that to the human sense of hearing, would be perceived as organic sounding.

In other words, he could create speakers that wouldn’t fatigue a listener over long periods of listening because the listener would perceive those sounds in the same way they would the nature’s roaring thunder of Niagara Falls to all the subtleties of the soundscapes at the Algonquin Provincial Park.

In Dr. Toole, Paul found a lifelong friend and peer who would influence him and whom he influenced, all in the pursuit of a way to reproduce sounds that listeners would perceive as equivalent to that which was real, alive, and natural.