Auditory Perception, The Truth!

"Warm", "cold", "harsh" are all quantifiable. Cable differences aren't.

 

I'm not about to read through that whole thing. Can you summarize it and explain why it relates to cables?

Actually, I would say the opposite. There are no precise values or quantities for "warm", "harsh", etc., just approximations but we can, very accurately, measure differences in cables. The pro-audio and scientific community know there are differences between cables, the difficulty we have with audiophiles is that these measurable differences are at least an order of magnitude below the ability of a human being to detect.

The relationship with the paper linked to: What the paper concludes is the multi-modality of perception, how what we perceive is a construct of the brain manufactured from all our senses. In other words what we hear is not based on the sound waves entering our ears but is based on a constructed perception comprised of sound waves, vision, touch, smell and state of mind. To an extent this is a scientific explanation of if we see an expensive looking component and expect it to sound better, our brain is likely to construct a perception of hearing which includes our sight and expectation. What I've sometimes seen referred to on head-fi as "placebo effect". Hence the link to the cable phenomenon.


I've never seen that paper before, interesting read. Interesting because science is usually in advance of practitioners but I think the reverse is true in some areas of sound perception. I have done a lot of sound for film/tv and contrary to popular belief, we do not try to re-create aural reality, instead we try to create an aural illusion which contains enough reality to suspend disbelief. Now this sounds nothing more than semantics but in reality it's a huge difference. It means we can generate and/or modify all kinds of sounds and noises to manipulate an audience's perception of what they are seeing and we can do this beyond the limits of reality., although not so far beyond the limits of reality as to destroy it. In other words, much of sound for film is about the manipulation of the perception of aural reality... an artistic endeavour, rather than a technical exercise. So in my opinion, the best understanding or expertise in sound and it's perception is not currently to be found in the scientific community but in the 80 year history of sound manipulation in film.

Taken from the paper: "The received scientific view thus holds that pitch is a subjective or psychological quality that is no more than correlated with objective frequency (see, e.g., Gelfand 2004, Houtsma 1995). Pitch, on this understanding, belongs only to experiences. The received view of pitch therefore implies an error theory according to which pitch experience involves a widespread projective illusion." : - Exactly what I was trying to explain to our composer student friend in the other thread but which he seemed unable to grasp.

G
Edited by gregorio - 9/4/11 at 9:37am

I read it all - I will happily summarize it. Mostly unhelpful in the context of the OP and this subforum in general. The section on cross-modal influence looked promising but did not adequately address the issue of visual appearance affecting expectations (but then that would have been psychology).

 

These are interesting questions but don't really help us HERE

I guess I should have said "audible cable differences". The terms the OP used are related to frequency response variations and we can measure those. We can't say specifically what dB a certain frequency is at using just the terms, but we can say generally where and what is going on, and we can describe a component as "warm" or "cold" based on its frequency response. We can't measure the audible differences between cables, the ones the OP is talking about (he even says "unmeasureable").

 

 

 

I figured that was the point.