I started to post this in the thread "Objectivists - what makes your blood boil" but as I wrote the post I saw that it really was somewhat off topic so I decided to start this alternative thread.
Let's not go down the usual route on this thread - try to keep it technical. The whole area of auditory perception is of huge interest to me as we seem to know little enough about it (although many will retort that we know more than I think) - maybe some recent summary papers might answer this retort -
2007 ;
2010 ; 2013 ;
I'd like to make a number of points which relate to why I think the pet characteristics associated with certain objectivist's viewpoint is erroneous:
- firstly, the pet characteristics I associate with a particular type of objectivist is:
- we don't know quite a lot about the workings of our auditory perception as is evidenced in the field of study called Auditory Scene Analysis. This being the hugely important aspect of how we make sense of the various vibrations impinging on our ears. To me, this is the most important aspect of what we hear in reproduced music - it's what determines how we judge how close a musical reproduction comes to realism, how it engages our emotions, how we can get an insight into the performance of the musical event being portrayed.
- when I say we don't know quite a lot about this, I don't mean that we don't know what neurons in what part of the brain do what (we don't), I mean we don't yet know how an auditory stream is formed by our brains - what are the salient primary aspects of the vibrations that we use to form these auditory objects i.e how we isolate one instrument in the string section of an orchestra & follow it as an auditory object over time, to the exclusion of the other instruments. It appears that there are a number of correlated aspects that we use to do this - temporal coherence being one important aspect of this formation of this auditory object.
- this function (which we all do naturally in our everyday lives, to make sense of the world) is a dynamic construction done in our brains from moment to moment & we seem only able to make conscious (focus on) one auditory object at a time.
- My point is that if we don't yet know the perceptual mechanisms that operate in ASA how can we say that measurements can tell us what is perceivable or not? I don't believe we yet have a sophisticated set of dynamic measurements that emulates this brain mechanism & therefore current measurements only give us very detailed snapshots of an auditory moment in time (I know there are dynamic measurements of speakers but AFAIK these only represent an aspect of what I'm talking about)
- There also exists in audio perception a similar blindness to change that is well recognised in visual perception - in other words auditory change blindness exists just as much as visual change blindness exists. We probably all know the visual test where we are asked to count the number of times a ball is passed between a group of people all moving around & most people don't see the guy dressed as a bear who walks across the scene.
- This, to me, is one of the major shortcomings with blind testing - it's not an "ears only test" as some maintain (there is no such thing as an ears only test) - it's a test of being able to isolate the particular difference between two pieces in advance & then being able to retain one's attention to just that particular difference while listening. Just playing two pieces & expecting the difference to pop out in our perceptions will only work if the differences are gross. So, as most agree, trained listeners are a necessary part of a useful blind test - being able to retain attention on a particular aspect of a piece is easily compromised by the number of unknowns at play - doing a blind test increases the number of unknowns & therefore, by itself, increases the difficulty of retaining this ability. Hence the oft quoted criticism that blind tests are really best for determining freq or amplitude differences between pieces, not for the type of dynamic differences mentioned above.
Let's not go down the usual route on this thread - try to keep it technical. The whole area of auditory perception is of huge interest to me as we seem to know little enough about it (although many will retort that we know more than I think) - maybe some recent summary papers might answer this retort -
2007 ;
2010 ; 2013 ;
I'd like to make a number of points which relate to why I think the pet characteristics associated with certain objectivist's viewpoint is erroneous:
- firstly, the pet characteristics I associate with a particular type of objectivist is:
- measurements are far more sensitive/reliable than hearing
- if the measurements show there is no audible difference then there can be no audible difference
- blind tests are needed to "prove" an audible difference exists
- we don't know quite a lot about the workings of our auditory perception as is evidenced in the field of study called Auditory Scene Analysis. This being the hugely important aspect of how we make sense of the various vibrations impinging on our ears. To me, this is the most important aspect of what we hear in reproduced music - it's what determines how we judge how close a musical reproduction comes to realism, how it engages our emotions, how we can get an insight into the performance of the musical event being portrayed.
- when I say we don't know quite a lot about this, I don't mean that we don't know what neurons in what part of the brain do what (we don't), I mean we don't yet know how an auditory stream is formed by our brains - what are the salient primary aspects of the vibrations that we use to form these auditory objects i.e how we isolate one instrument in the string section of an orchestra & follow it as an auditory object over time, to the exclusion of the other instruments. It appears that there are a number of correlated aspects that we use to do this - temporal coherence being one important aspect of this formation of this auditory object.
- this function (which we all do naturally in our everyday lives, to make sense of the world) is a dynamic construction done in our brains from moment to moment & we seem only able to make conscious (focus on) one auditory object at a time.
- My point is that if we don't yet know the perceptual mechanisms that operate in ASA how can we say that measurements can tell us what is perceivable or not? I don't believe we yet have a sophisticated set of dynamic measurements that emulates this brain mechanism & therefore current measurements only give us very detailed snapshots of an auditory moment in time (I know there are dynamic measurements of speakers but AFAIK these only represent an aspect of what I'm talking about)
- There also exists in audio perception a similar blindness to change that is well recognised in visual perception - in other words auditory change blindness exists just as much as visual change blindness exists. We probably all know the visual test where we are asked to count the number of times a ball is passed between a group of people all moving around & most people don't see the guy dressed as a bear who walks across the scene.
- This, to me, is one of the major shortcomings with blind testing - it's not an "ears only test" as some maintain (there is no such thing as an ears only test) - it's a test of being able to isolate the particular difference between two pieces in advance & then being able to retain one's attention to just that particular difference while listening. Just playing two pieces & expecting the difference to pop out in our perceptions will only work if the differences are gross. So, as most agree, trained listeners are a necessary part of a useful blind test - being able to retain attention on a particular aspect of a piece is easily compromised by the number of unknowns at play - doing a blind test increases the number of unknowns & therefore, by itself, increases the difficulty of retaining this ability. Hence the oft quoted criticism that blind tests are really best for determining freq or amplitude differences between pieces, not for the type of dynamic differences mentioned above.
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