Hello Mike, interesting thoughts.
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Originally Posted by mike1127 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Music is more like a basketball game... too rich to take in everything at once, and there is no way of "laying it all out in front of you."
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I agree with this.
One day, in Hydrogenaudio forums, someone pretended to hear easily the difference between Musepack standard and wav. He provided a sample that he had ABXed.
I could not hear any difference. Normally, I would have concluded that they sound identical, but since the guy had succeeded, I listened over and over, until I finally realized that at a given time, one side of the background reverberation of the distorsion of a note of one of the guitars sounded different !
Once this difference identified, the ABX was easy.
I've got a pair of samples at home that I'll post here, that could be very interesting in this discussion. There is a difference between them that should be difficult to find, but that is however into the "shoes / bare feet" category that you spoke about in your other post : I could distinguish which sample I'm listening to, even after a long period and without reference. I just have to remember which is named A, and which is named B.
No musical trick in them, one is just the Vorbis encoding of the other.
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Originally Posted by mike1127 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
It's my opinion that short snippets actually block access to information; namely, musical information.
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There are two different cases here.
In many ABX, someone claims that a difference exists, and tries to ABX it. Or you think that you're hearing a difference, and wants to check blinded.
Your statement does not apply in this case, because the listener already knows the difference. The test just has to take place in the same conditions as the ones in which the difference was heard to begin with.
But sometimes, the listeners don't know the difference in advance. For example in public mp3 ABC/HR tests. You usually take part in this test saying "let's see if the difference is audible". Here, your statement, be it true or false, apply.
That's why it is very important in these kind of tests to look for the most possible discriminating conditions. The result entierly depends on the listening conditions. If this kind of test fails, it is not possible to tell if it was because the difference was not there to begin with, or if the listeners failed to find a musical sample, or listening conditions that allowed to reveal it, unless this point was thouroughly investigated before the test, and virtually all possibilities taken into account.
In the first kind of test, in case of failure, a whole range of posibilities is avoided : choice of the sample, listening system... Only some remain : listening fatigue, repetitions...
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Originally Posted by mike1127 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I will close with an observation of what I believe is a common fallacy. It's this: "Anything you can be conscious of while listening to sound as music, will also come to consciousness while listening to sound as sound."
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I am quite in agreement with you, except that in practice, the situation where the difference is musical and not sonic is very rare.
I can think of two distorsions that may fall in this category :
The wow caused by badly centered vinyl records. This causes a slow oscillation of the pitch. On fixed-pitch instruments, like piano, this can appear as a sonic difference. A piano never outputs pitch-varying notes.
But on instruments whose pitch can be modulated, like human voice, the problem can appear as purely musical. The badly centered record is then equivalent to a bad singer.
I think also about dynamics compresion. This is also a kind of sonic alteration that can fall into the musical category, when applied with a given time-delay. It can supress some musical expression, like accentuated attacks, or short-term volume modulation performed by the musician.