[mike1127]

I agree with the scientists---tests must be blind to overcome human bias. E.g., food testing scientists have demonstrated that people will prefer the pretty package over the plain one---doesn't even matter what's inside.

But I have reservations about many audio DBTs. Why? In a nutshell, because I doubt that listeners can be sensitive to the right things under the test conditions.

Now, a longer explanation.

The human mind is hierarchical. At the bottom are the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, our inheritance from early animals. Higher up are more complicated structures, like the reptilian brain and the mammalian brain. At the top is consciousness. Evolution threw that in last.

It's a bit like a military unit, headed up by a sergeant. The men under him take care of a lot of menial tasks automatically. Often they don't even talk to him, when there's no need. Sometimes they do communicate with the sergeant, either bringing things to his attention or answering his questions.

Let's say that sergeant is human consciousness. Under him are guys like Private Ear (he processes sounds and talks to the sergeant about them), Private Movement (he handles body movement), Private Heat Sensitive Nerves, etc.

What happens when you touch a hot stove? Private Heat Sensitive Nerves will detect that and dispatch an urgent message to Sergeant Consciousness. But something happens first. Private Movement gets that message! You jerk your hand back before you even feel the heat.

How do you know, consciously, that you touched something hot? You know it first through movement, and only a moment later through heat nerves.

So the Privates talk to each other as well as to Sergeant Consciousness. You can know things about the world through more than one Private.

I observe in myself, and others have agreed, that listening to music involves not just Private Ear, but also Private Movement and Private Emotion.

I always consciously notice the sound: Private Ear talks to Sergeant Consciousness. But it appears that Private Ear is also having side conversation with Private Movement and Private Emotion. Do I consciously decide what way of moving expresses the music? No. Do I analyze it prior to “deciding” what emotion it should have? Nope. That stuff happens unconsciously.

There are many DBT protocols. I am not arguing that valid DBT is impossible. Let's look at just one protocol first.

Let me repeat: I am not claiming valid DBT is impossible. I think that's the number one misunderstanding when I explain this stuff.

Let's look at just one protocol. It's the music-snippet, quick-switch style. You listen to a very short clip of music on device A, then instantly switch to device B.

As a musician, I'm aware that music has large-scale structure. Often, its effects are apparent only after listening to a decently long segment. As the music plays, Private Ear is communicating stuff to Sergeant Consciousness, but is also talking to Privates Movement and Emotion. What can Sergeant Consciousness pick up in a one-second clip? Certainly a bit of information. But for the test to be valid, we must assume that it doesn't change how Private Ear talks to Private Movements and Emotion. That seems like a shaky assumption.

Let me amplify this point. Let's say I claim that devices A and B sound different. What does that mean, exactly, about how Sergeant Consciousness experiences them? He might pick up the difference from what Sergeant Ear says, but he might only get the difference from what Privates Emotion and Movement say.

Here's the problem. If the test protocol encourages Sergeant Consciousness to talk only to Private Ear, then consciousness will miss the vital difference.

Often someone says to me: “Your point is not relevant---nobody said ABX has to be short-snippet---it can be long listening.”

Well, the vast majority of audio scientists' knowledge about the brain's experience of sound is based on short-snippet tests. Everything they tell you about mp3 codecs, for example. All that research was based on short-snippet tests. So implicating short-snippet tests has some relevance to the state of scientific knowledge about listening.

There is more to say about long-term listening tests, but I'll leave it here for now.
 

 

[mike1127]

This is a reply to royalcrown and Roger Strummer.
 
I pointed out that musicians are generally not in a state of confusion about the emotion in the music they are creating vs. their mood that day. Roger said,
 
Comparing different things. The creation of artistic pieces is a different activity than the reception/consumption of those pieces.
 
I wouldn't say that's true, because most of creation is perception. I create by perceiving what I have created, by developing critical listening faculties. So a musician's skill at isolating musical feeling from personal feeling is something that directly translates to audio evaluation.
 
royalcrown wrote: Your reviews, as you do them, tell nothing at all about the actual piece of audio. By shifting the focus from (what you term) the "sound as sound," to that of "feeling," you've effectively shifted the focus from the audio equipment to yourself.
 
This is the assumption that Sergeant Consciousness can ascertain/perceive every detail, every nuance of the sound, by talking to Private Ear. As a musician, I find this assumption to be unlikely. As I said, Private Ear is saying things to Privates Movement and Emotion that he's not saying to Sergeant Consciousness.
 
The question then becomes: which is more useful, a depiction of the experience some guy had listening to a piece of kit, or the sound of the kit itself? I would much rather read about the latter, so I can decide on the sound as it relates to my own putative emotional states; which will, invariably, differ extraordinarily from your own experiences.
 
As I've stated above, I disagree dance and emotion are unrelated to the functioning of the audio device. There are two consequences to that. (1) A reader of my review who includes dance and emotion as I do, will find my review more useful than one focusing on "sound as sound." (I know several such people---perhaps they are not common on head-fi, however.) (2) Since controlled tests have generally disregarded the dance and emotion factors, I wonder about the real meaning and relevance of those tests.
 
Thanks for the replies,
Mike

 

[royalcrown]

Why do you create a new thread for everything? This could have easily fit under one thread. Anyway, I'm ignoring the entirety of the first post because this response should have been in the first thread in the first place; I might respond to it later, but it's very lengthy and makes use of some egregiously inappropriate metaphors so I'll have to get to it later.
 
Quote:

 
This is the assumption that Sergeant Consciousness can ascertain/perceive every detail, every nuance of the sound, by talking to Private Ear. As a musician, I find this assumption to be unlikely. As I said, Private Ear is saying things to Privates Movement and Emotion that he's not saying to Sergeant Consciousness.
 
This is patently false. If you cannot consciously detect a difference, there is no audible difference. It's not an assumption that "Sergeant Consciousness" can perceive every detail, it's fact: any details that aren't perceived by the conscious mind is not perceived. There is no such thing as unconscious perception, period. There is only unconscious sensation, however DBTs do not ask if you sense a difference, only if you can perceive a difference, which is the only thing that matters when it comes to a DBT.
 
The question then becomes: which is more useful, a depiction of the experience some guy had listening to a piece of kit, or the sound of the kit itself? I would much rather read about the latter, so I can decide on the sound as it relates to my own putative emotional states; which will, invariably, differ extraordinarily from your own experiences.
 
As I've stated above, I disagree dance and emotion are unrelated to the functioning of the audio device. There are two consequences to that. (1) A reader of my review who includes dance and emotion as I do, will find my review more useful than one focusing on "sound as sound." (I know several such people---perhaps they are not common on head-fi, however.) (2) Since controlled tests have generally disregarded the dance and emotion factors, I wonder about the real meaning and relevance of those tests.
 
Again, if dance and emotion are related in you and not the audio device, then dance and emotion are unrelated to the audio device. How could they possibly be related if the dance and emotion are located inside of you and not the audio kit? If some people on head-fi find you talking about your personal feelings and not about the audio device useful, that's fine and good - I will also say that I know several such people that believe in cutting up multi-thousand dollar power cables to make the bass more lifelike and real, so the argumentum ad populum holds here.
 
I have to stress that controlled tests disregard the "dance and emotion" factors because they are irrelevant to the audio device. Messing around with those factors just leads to confounding variables: the relevance of the tests is to the audio components, not to the emotion they invoke in a subject, because the emotion would vary from subject to subject, and (this is the most important part) those emotions are not necessarily caused by the audio component. Testing someone's emotions would have to control for bad hair days, weather changes (which can influence emotion far more than an audio component), temperature, time of day, etc. etc.... if you think you can somehow isolate the emotions of the listener with regards to the audio component in a reliably controlled way, then by all means enlighten us. However, sloppily talking about emotions with no regard for controlling confounding variables (i.e. audio reviews that are mostly purple prose) is not science, and that is why you will never see a properly done "test" to account for this.

 

[Danneq]

@royalcrown
 
 
I'm not taking sides in any debate about DBT. However I find it interesting when you say
 
Quote:

any details that aren't perceived by the conscious mind is not perceived. There is no such thing as unconscious perception, period.
 

 
 
I do not know much about the research in the field of psychology, but there seems to be a consensus that there is such a thing as unconscious perception. However, it seems like most research concerning unconscious perception has dealt with vision and not hearing, so you might have a point in that respect.
 
Unconscious perception is at a lower level than conscious perception, something that animals need when they live in a dangerous environment. A sense of fear without any rational explanation can mean life or death for the subject.
If that comes into play when listening to music, however, is another question that I do not even want to start speculating about...

 

[royalcrown]

Danneq:
 
Unconscious perception in psychology is better termed unconscious processing, since (as far as I know - any experts feel free to correct me) it deals with behavioral responses to subconscious stimuli (i.e. priming in response to millisecond stimuli, or something such as blindsightedness). AFAIK actual subliminal stimuli are largely discredited, which seems to be what is being alluded to here: that is, something that isn't directly perceived as qualia by the listener but somehow affects his/her emotional state.

 

[Spelaeus]

I'm not going to go as in-depth on this as I'd like to as I'm extraordinarily tired and not quite coherent enough for it, but it is quite possible for stimuli to be perceived without there being any conscious awareness of the matter. For instance, look at people with type 1 blindsight. These are people who are for all intents and purposes blind in anywhere from a limited portion of their field of vision to an entire hemifield due to damage to the primary visual cortex in the cerebral hemisphere that corresponds to that side of the visual field. The destruction of the primary visual cortex means that the main neurological pathway for visual information has been knocked out, but there are other possible pathways, though these pathways are largely insignificant for a healthy human being. So... if you were to, say, randomly generate an X or an O in the blind portion of such a person's field of vision and asked them what was there, they'd tell you that they have no idea. And consciously wouldn't. If, however, you then force them to make a guess as to whether an X or an O was generated, they would guess correctly with a frequency far exceeding random chance over many trials. This has occurred with accuracy as high as 90% or so in some experiments. And yet consciously, these people are entirely unable to be aware of anything within their blinded field.
 
Yet another example exists in people with associative visual agnosia. This causes someone to be utterly incapable of consciously perceiving a certain class of objects. Purely as an example, let's say a patient is incapable of perceiving musical instruments. You could point out a guitar to them and ask them what it is, and they will be utterly incapable of telling you. If you ask them what a guitar is, they could tell you. If you ask them to draw the "object," they would be able to reproduce a drawing of a guitar. And yet, they are incapable of being aware that "that object over there that is being pointed to" is a guitar.
 
The point being, consciousness is a tricky thing, and not as substantial as we'd often like to think. The human nervous system is constantly processing huge amounts of information, and yet we are only consciously aware of a small fraction of that information. This even happens on a day-to-day basis. Your brain is processing much more visual information from a given scene than you'd ever be consciously aware of. You'll get the important bits, and some of the not-so important bits. But for efficiency's sake, you'll never get all of it. And yet, that information was still processed by processes below the level of conscious awareness. Ever find yourself incapable of finding something right in front of your nose? You didn't go blind, your nervous system processed the visual information. You just weren't able to bring that information into a level of conscious awareness. And as the example of blindsight shows, "unconscious" processing of sensory information can still lead to something that can be experienced on a conscious level. In the case at hand, it is quite possible for a person not to be consciously aware of specific sonic element as they listen to music, and yet still experience an emotional response due to it without being able to consciously give name to that element. On the other hand, this does not render DBT ineffectual since the emotional response is still a conscious experience even if the information that gave rise to it wasn't consciously perceived, and as such there is still a claim of a perceived difference. Is it absolutely, 100% failproof? No. Is it the absolute best method possible? No. I would also absolutely love to see an fMRI machine implemented on this topic, but that's just not practical, and proposing such isn't really a solution. DBT remains the best *practical* method that we have of evaluating claimed differences in audio gear. It is imperfect, but not even close to the extent of being rendered invalid.
 
Edit: That's also not to say that all DBT is valid. It is a useful tool, but can be applied incorrectly. And ignoring the nature of how we process audio information in regards to conscious awareness would be an error that would need addressing.

 

[mike1127]

I wrote:
 
This is the assumption that Sergeant Consciousness can ascertain/perceive every detail, every nuance of the sound, by talking to Private Ear. As a musician, I find this assumption to be unlikely. As I said, Private Ear is saying things to Privates Movement and Emotion that he's not saying to Sergeant Consciousness.
 
Royalcrown wrote:
 
This is patently false. If you cannot consciously detect a difference, there is no audible difference. It's not an assumption that "Sergeant Consciousness" can perceive every detail, it's fact: any details that aren't perceived by the conscious mind is not perceived. There is no such thing as unconscious perception, period.
 
You aren't responding to what I wrote. The assumption is that Sergeant Consciousness can ascertain/perceive every relevant detail by talking to Private Ear. I'm not making any statements about "unconscious perception." I am saying that there's a lot of "unconscious processing" which is well backed by psychology and neurology, not to mention common sense.
 
Royalcrown wrote:
 
Again, if dance and emotion are related in you and not the audio device, then dance and emotion are unrelated to the audio device.
 
All conscious experience of sound is a combination of the device's behavior and your brain's processing. Even "sound as sound." If you say something as simple as "This is bright," that is a conscious perception that arises from a combination of your brain's behavior and the device's behavior. "Dance" and "emotion" are no different than "brightness" or "punchy bass" in this respect. They are ways of responding to sound. They may be hard to control in a DBT, but that's no reason to ignore them.
 
 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

The point being, consciousness is a tricky thing, and not as substantial as we'd often like to think. The human nervous system is constantly processing huge amounts of information, and yet we are only consciously aware of a small fraction of that information.
 
Exactly.
 
DBT remains the best *practical* method that we have of evaluating claimed differences in audio gear. It is imperfect, but not even close to the extent of being rendered invalid.
 
This seems to me like saying, "It's hard so we'll just ignore it."
 
Edit: That's also not to say that all DBT is valid. It is a useful tool, but can be applied incorrectly. And ignoring the nature of how we process audio information in regards to conscious awareness would be an error that would need addressing.
 
I agree with this.

 

 

[royalcrown]

Quote:

... For instance, look at people with type 1 blindsight ...if you were to, say, randomly generate an X or an O in the blind portion of such a person's field of vision and asked them what was there, they'd tell you that they have no idea. And consciously wouldn't. If, however, you then force them to make a guess as to whether an X or an O was generated, they would guess correctly with a frequency far exceeding random chance over many trials. This has occurred with accuracy as high as 90% or so in some experiments. And yet consciously, these people are entirely unable to be aware of anything within their blinded field.
 
This is why I mentioned blindsightedness in my original post - it has to do with behavioral responses to stimuli, not conscious perception - even though they can distinguish stimuli (i.e. they can sense stimuli), they cannot consciously perceive the stimuli (hence why they have no idea about what they're seeing despite their guesses being greater than chance). However wrt headphones this is irrelevant, because we are concerned with the qualitative conscious experience of the signal that the audio component is producing - if any behavioral responses did exist, they would only come up in positive trials, not negative ones, because the behavioral response would result in higher scores. However, since blind test scores are poor, it's unlikely that any behavioral responses are at play here.
 
Yet another example exists in people with associative visual agnosia. This causes someone to be utterly incapable of consciously perceiving a certain class of objects. Purely as an example, let's say a patient is incapable of perceiving musical instruments. You could point out a guitar to them and ask them what it is, and they will be utterly incapable of telling you. If you ask them what a guitar is, they could tell you. If you ask them to draw the "object," they would be able to reproduce a drawing of a guitar. And yet, they are incapable of being aware that "that object over there that is being pointed to" is a guitar.
 
Again, if these behavioral responses exist, they're not part of the experience of actually listening to music, and if they were appreciable, they would show up in positive results to blind tests. This has not been the case.
 
The point being, consciousness is a tricky thing, and not as substantial as we'd often like to think. The human nervous system is constantly processing huge amounts of information, and yet we are only consciously aware of a small fraction of that information. This even happens on a day-to-day basis. Your brain is processing much more visual information from a given scene than you'd ever be consciously aware of. You'll get the important bits, and some of the not-so important bits. But for efficiency's sake, you'll never get all of it. And yet, that information was still processed by processes below the level of conscious awareness. Ever find yourself incapable of finding something right in front of your nose? You didn't go blind, your nervous system processed the visual information. You just weren't able to bring that information into a level of conscious awareness.
 
And as the example of blindsight shows, "unconscious" processing of sensory information can still lead to something that can be experienced on a conscious level.
 
Here is where your reasoning goes astray. You said it yourself, with individuals with blindsight, they do not have anything that an be experienced on a conscious level - they are able to guess at a rate higher than chance (due to "instinct" so to speak), but have no conscious experience of it whatsoever. How could unconscious processing lead to anything conscious? Unconsciousness is the opposite of consciousness.
 
In the case at hand, it is quite possible for a person not to be consciously aware of specific sonic element as they listen to music, and yet still experience an emotional response due to it without being able to consciously give name to that element.
 
As I think you allude to later down, if there is an emotional response to the music, even if there's no conscious name for it, it would still show up in a blind test (i.e. choice A sweeps you off your feet and B does not, even though they sound the same).
 
On the other hand, this does not render DBT ineffectual since the emotional response is still a conscious experience even if the information that gave rise to it wasn't consciously perceived, and as such there is still a claim of a perceived difference. Is it absolutely, 100% failproof? No. Is it the absolute best method possible? No. I would also absolutely love to see an fMRI machine implemented on this topic, but that's just not practical, and proposing such isn't really a solution. DBT remains the best *practical* method that we have of evaluating claimed differences in audio gear. It is imperfect, but not even close to the extent of being rendered invalid.
 
I suppose that perceptual and sensational distinctions are interesting, but they hardly have anything to do with blind testing. It's not like there's an unconscious factor that ruins one's ability to distinguish between two components only when the listener does not know which is which.
 
Edit: That's also not to say that all DBT is valid. It is a useful tool, but can be applied incorrectly. And ignoring the nature of how we process audio information in regards to conscious awareness would be an error that would need addressing.
 
I think the important question is, how do these phenomena invalidate any DBT that isn't already invalid in the first place?

I'm just going to quote wikipedia here, because this is what the whole military analogy amounts to. It's actually very basic psychology, and has very little bearing on blind testing.
 
"Sensation is the function of the low-level biochemical and neurological events that begin with the impinging of a stimulus upon the receptor cells of a sensory organ.
Perception is the mental process or state that is reflected in statements like "I see a uniformly blue wall", representing awareness or understanding of the real-world cause of the sensory input.
In other words, sensations are the first stages in the functioning of senses to represent stimuli from the environment, and perception is a higher brain function about interpreting events and objects in the world."

 

[Danneq]

 
Quote:

Danneq:
 
Unconscious perception in psychology is better termed unconscious processing, since (as far as I know - any experts feel free to correct me) it deals with behavioral responses to subconscious stimuli (i.e. priming in response to millisecond stimuli, or something such as blindsightedness). AFAIK actual subliminal stimuli are largely discredited, which seems to be what is being alluded to here: that is, something that isn't directly perceived as qualia by the listener but somehow affects his/her emotional state.

 
Well, we might have been talking past each other a bit. I was not considering the stimuli's possible effect on the subject's emotional state. Since I am not very interested in the discussion about DBT, but more in the philosophical and psychological questions that popped up in this thread, I only focus on the possibility of unconscious/non conscious perception.
 
Blindsightedness in interesting and I do not make such a big difference between unconscious perception and unconscious processing. Just because one can be proven does not disprove the other.
This article describes conscious and unconscious processing, but does not do away with unconscious perception. In my meaning, if there is such a thing as an unconscious part of our mind, does it have access to the "reacting parts" of our brain, but not the stimuli receiving parts?
 
On page 157 blindsight is defined:
Quote:

Blindsight is the ability of patients with a damaged primary visual cortex
(or the projections to it) to report aspects of a stimulus that is presented to the
blind area of their visual field (Weiskrantz 1986). Such patients perform
reliably above chance (typically in localization tasks), often despite their low
confidence in their response. Blindsight may thus be considered as an example
of perception without awareness.

 
 
During my studies of philosophy and (older) psychological works I have run into a theory of déjà vu. I cannot for the life of me recall the name of its originator. It is not included in the Wikipedia article concerning déjà vu, which instead focuses on short and long term memory as an explanation.
 
Anyway, you are probably familiar with déjà vu and the feeling of experiencing a situation that has happened before. According to this theory, the brain which constantly interprets the stimuli that the senses are bombarded with, sometimes experiences a "hiccup". This might lead to the conscious interpretation of perceptions received by the senses falling a fraction of a millisecond behind the unconscious' reception of the same. That means that when the brain interprets the stimuli, our unconscious mind has already registered them, so it seems that we are experiencing something that has already happened. Now, I cannot remember where I have read about this theory, but it seems like the best explanation to me. Since our only experience of the world is through our senses, and the interpretation of the stimuli to our senses is done by our brain, the slightest disturbances in that process might cause the strangest sensations.
 
The pharmacology section of the Wikipedia article states that certain drugs increase the chances of déjà vu. Also it is stated that some researchers have used hypnosis to recreate déjà vu like experiences. Hypnosis might be doubted, but this method is supposed to "shut off" the conscious mind and get into the unconscious. Drugs affect the brain in a way that disturbs its normal functions, among them the conscious interpretation of the stimuli our senses are bombarded with. This seems to support that theory of déjà vu.
 
This is very interesting, however not very related to DBT. When it comes to the possibility of the unconscious being able to perceive details in music which the conscious cannot perceive and this affecting our emotional state, I am not as sure. The brain is complex and can under normal conditions interpret all the stimuli the senses provides it with.

 

[mike1127]

Please note: I'm not going for DBT's jugular. Primarily I'm making observations, some of which may relate to well-designed DBTs, some of which may be related to listening styles, and some of which may be just interesting.
 
I don't think that people perceive raw sensory stimuli under normal circumstances.. there is a great deal of unconscious processing that creates an interpretation. Mindfulness meditators demonstrate (at least to themselves) that much of what we take to be true about the world is actually an arbitrary interpretation of it... the world, and ourselves, have far richer possibilities that we usually suspect. I have directly experienced this through mindfulness and sensory awareness practice.
 
But even if you doubt what meditators learn, it's pretty obvious that when you look at a visual scene, you are seeing an interpretation of it. There's no conscious decision to "see a table here" and "a tree over there." You just do it. But engineers who design artificial vision systems know there are many calculations needed to get there.
 
Given that we become aware of the world through multiple modalities simultaneously, I see no reason to assume that all available information of a musical event can be perceived through one modality only.

 

[Danneq]

@mike1127
 
You have a good point in your last post.
 
The difficulty, what we in Swedish call "den springande punkten" (Latin "punctum saliens", English "the leaping point"), is to separate what is received by the senses from the interpretation of it. The two are too closely connected to successfully point out something as being "raw sensory stimuli" and something as an interpretation of that stimuli.

 

[mike1127]

Thanks, Danneq, that is interesting.

 

[eucariote]

^ two comments- the hierarchical view of brain function described above is a bit outdated.  Look up Damasio's Descartes' Error for an up-to date account of the fiction of consciousness holding the reins in the brain.  Anosognosia is a perfect example of how consciousness can become preoccupied with inventing (sometimes patently untrue) reasons for things already decided and acted upon by 'lower' brain systems.
 
Comment two- choice behavior is usually not a 'conscious' decision (a fiction introduced by Descartes and Husserl).  It's mostly an issue of desire, emotion and pre/non conscious hedonic preference, the main subject of book mentioned above.  The role of behavior stemming from the neocortex is mostly to reflect and inhibit stupid behavior of some .1-1% of actions from the rest of the brain, which is otherwise in charge.  So in in fact multiple systems contribute to choice behavior, a balance which can be dissociated with good experiments, biased towards cortical or subcortical control by certain kinds of brain damage, etc. etc.

 

[Danneq]

@eucariote
 
I doubt that any of the participants in this thread have followed current research concerning the functions of the brain. Myself having studied philosophy and the history of science most of my sources are just that - historical and not current.
However, sometimes what can be seen as outdated can come into swing again, I mainly think of some physicist's theories of the universe as being cyclic, i.e. from all mass gathered in one small point to a big bang, and the universe expanding to a point where it starts contracting into one small point. Then the process starts over. This is a very shallow description, but I know there are current theories the function of the universe that are like this.
If we look back to the Greek Stoic school of philosophy, they see god as creating the universe from fire, creating all the elements of the universe and the world as we know it. This then goes back to that state of fire from which another cycle is begun. There is no end to this cycle of the universe being created and destroyed and then created again.
 
My point is that I think it's interesting that no matter how the tools that man uses to explore the world around here becomes more and more exact, her way of thinking does not change much.
 
I would not even dare to venture into speculating concerning choice behavior. I mainly found it interesting whether or not we consciously perceive all the impressions received by our senses. To me it seems unreasonable that we are conscious of all sensory input.