[rroseperry]

^ 2x

But it's not useful to talk about aural experience that's intrinsically not subject to measurement, like emotional reactions to music. From my sig, you can tell that the experience of listening to music is much more important to me than the gear. But at the same time I like learning about the technicalities of audio reproduction.

Threads like this always wander off into the underbrush of amateur philosophy and science-bashing, both of which I find immeasurably irritating.

 

[BlackbeardBen]

Quote:

^ 2x

But it's not useful to talk about aural experience that's intrinsically not subject to measurement, like emotional reactions to music. From my sig, you can tell that the experience of listening to music is much more important to me than the gear. But at the same time I like learning about the technicalities of audio reproduction.

Threads like this always wander off into the underbrush of amateur philosophy and science-bashing, both of which I find immeasurably irritating.

But the thing is, unless you point fingers towards the supernatural we may well eventually be able to understand to a very precise level just how and why we experience certain emotions from any specific sound or combination thereof, and be able to model predicted responses to any sound.
 
By this I more or less mean that unless there's the supernatural involved, we one day may be able to accurately model the entire human brain in all its details with the same level of precision as we would the behavior of an electrical circuit today.
 
We obviously can't do that now, although an ever-expanding higher-level rudimentary understanding of psychoacoustics is slowly giving us an understanding of human response to any given auditory (and/or other senses') input.

 

[Uncle Erik]

BlackbeardBen, there's a social and cultural aspect to the emotional response to music. It has been studied extensively - you might find it interesting. Try some music theory and studies. We pick up clues (such as music along with certain scenes in movies) from tempo, minor and major keys, even particular instruments.

You will also find that speakers and other components are voiced for certain markets. The same model of speaker can vary depending on the country it is sold in because of cultural tastes. I was surprised when I learned this, but it makes a lot of sense.

There's a lot of thoughtful research and more rigorous science going on behind the scenes than most realize.

 

[gregorio]

You wrote a lot of stuff, so let my try to address just one thing and see where it gets us.
 
I explained why optical or aural illusions have nothing to do with transparency. The McGurk effect has nothing to do with transparency. Can we start by having you read and answer that post?

It has everything to do with transparency. Neuroscience tells us that only a small fraction of the sensory input to the brain is processed, to process it all we would require a brain 5 or so times bigger than it's current size. The vast majority of the sensory input to our brain is discarded, what is left is used to manufacture a model of reality. What sensory information is discarded and what is retained and how the model is constructed depends largely on experience (that's how cultural differences affect audio perception). Which is why it's impossible to predict everyone's responses, we all have different experience. The McGurk Effect proves that our perception of what we hear is a rather vague approximation of the sound entering our ears and that the approximation we create can easily be fooled. That is why measurements can be so useful, we can compare measurements with our perception. There are some people that have spent most of their lives doing just that. They have effectively trained their brains to retain more aural information and to build a more accurate perception of what they hear. In the pro-audio world we call these people "golden ears" and there are very, very few of them, Bob Katz, George Massenburg, Bob Ludwig and Bob Ohlsson are good examples. These people are regarded as the greatest of mastering engineers and are responsible for a huge number of hits and grammies. It's not that they actually have ears or hearing better than you or me (if anything their hearing is worse as they are mostly in their 60s), just that they are able to perceive more accurately what they are hearing. But even these "golden ears" would be the first to admit that their perception is far from truly accurate, bearing in mind that the ear is non-linear device in the first place. The McGurk Effect proves that you could in theory have two perfectly identical and transparent sound systems and perceive a difference where none could exist. Of course it's therefore just as likely that two provably different sound systems could sound the same. All of this explains the difference between the audiophile world and the professional audio world. The audiophiles have trained their hearing against abstract values and the audio professionals (should) have trained their hearing against measured reality. The only way we can judge the linearity (transparency) of a system is to measure the sound wave going in, measure the sound wave going out and compare the two. Using your ears to determine transparency tells us more about your perception of transparency than it does about the actual performance of the system.

Gregorio-- By the way I worked as a scientist for many years before I left to pursue a DMA in music composition. You may be a very experienced at manipulating sound, but I don't think that's reason you are shocked by my opinions. I think the reason is that you have a (probably unconscious) epistemology in which objective things are "real" and subjective things are "not real." It shocks you to discover that an intelligent, informed person could put the emphasis the other way.
 
EDIT: to be more exact, I put them more on an equal basis than you, and you have a VERY rigid attitude toward this. Notice how every time you refer to perception you use the word "just"-- it's "just" our perception. I think that's completely misguided.
 

My work as a musician and composer are entirely about perception, my work as a recording engineer and producer is partly about perception and partly about the measurements and reality of sound waves, art and science. It is the combination of these two which has kept me so fascinated in music creation for so many years and it is the perception of the art I create that pays the bills. When I'm discussing music my priority is with the art and it's perception but when I'm discussing the performance of electronic equipment my priority is with the science of electronics. I would go as far as to say that my understanding of the perception of hearing vs. the reality of sound waves is more than partly responsible for my professional survival and success.

G

 

[SpaceTimeMorph]

Quote:

I like listening to music a lot more than epistemology. In fact, epistemology is kinda like eating slimy spinach. I only do it when I have to.

Yep, I lol'd.
 
Quote:

Gregorio-- By the way I worked as a scientist for many years before I left to pursue a DMA in music composition.
 

 
I highly doubt the first part of this sentence.  All of the scientists/engineers I've worked with praise measurements, data, figures, and the like.  The common mantra is always "show me the numbers."  You definitely have to take into account what the possible errors/biases etc... are when you interpret the measurements, however, they can tell you everything (within a limited scope) you would like to know about a particular aspect of what you are studying.
 
Furthermore, if listening is such a valuable tool and you are so good at it, why don't you volunteer for some DBT's to demonstrate your superior listening ability?
 

 

[mike1127]

 
Quote:

Originally Posted by gregorio /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Neuroscience tells us that only a small fraction of the sensory input to the brain is processed, to process it all we would require a brain 5 or so times bigger than it's current size. The vast majority of the sensory input to our brain is discarded, what is left is used to manufacture a model of reality.

Yup. Mindfulness meditation and other sensory awareness methods also make that clear.
 
 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

 All of the scientists/engineers I've worked with praise measurements, data, figures, and the like.
 

"Praise" measurements? You mean they fall down and worship the standard deviation?
 
 
Quote:

Furthermore, if listening is such a valuable tool and you are so good at it, why don't you volunteer for some DBT's to demonstrate your superior listening ability?

If you think all one has to do is "volunteer", you have no idea what you are talking about. I've done as much as I can but what I need is OTHER people to volunteer to help me run the experiment and that's almost impossible to find.
 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

Yep, I lol'd.
 
I highly doubt the first part of this sentence.  All of the scientists/engineers I've worked with praise measurements, data, figures, and the like.
 

You may not have worked with scientists/engineers who did statistical spacecraft navigation. That's one area where one is forced to realize that measurements are models,  not reality itself.
 

 

[rroseperry]

But the thing is, unless you point fingers towards the supernatural we may well eventually be able to understand to a very precise level just how and why we experience certain emotions from any specific sound or combination thereof, and be able to model predicted responses to any sound.
 
By this I more or less mean that unless there's the supernatural involved, we one day may be able to accurately model the entire human brain in all its details with the same level of precision as we would the behavior of an electrical circuit today.
 
We obviously can't do that now, although an ever-expanding higher-level rudimentary understanding of psychoacoustics is slowly giving us an understanding of human response to any given auditory (and/or other senses') input.

Actually I think we will be able to model the human brain in time, but there's just so much that's not known about how consciousness and the mind (and all they entail) emerges from the physical.

(not a believer in the supernatural, myself)

 

[bigshot]

Electronic reproduction of music for listening enjoyment involves a few simple concepts... frequency, dynamics, distortion... within the limitations of the range of human hearing. Too often, discussion in this forum drifts off into chasing numbers that are outside of the range of human hearing, or emotional responses to music that have absolutely nothing to do with the reproduction of sound. Discussion of testing methodology and philosophy of our perception of the world around us has even less to offer a hifi nut. In the middle of that pile of rhetorical and theoretical absurdity is the core of how to understand how our equipment works and how we can make it perform at its peak... frequency, dynamics, distortion within the range of human hearing.

 

[gregorio]

Electronic reproduction of music for listening enjoyment involves a few simple concepts... frequency, dynamics, distortion... within the limitations of the range of human hearing. Too often, discussion in this forum drifts off into chasing numbers that are outside of the range of human hearing, or emotional responses to music that have absolutely nothing to do with the reproduction of sound. Discussion of testing methodology and philosophy of our perception of the world around us has even less to offer a hifi nut. In the middle of that pile of rhetorical and theoretical absurdity is the core of how to understand how our equipment works and how we can make it perform at its peak... frequency, dynamics, distortion within the range of human hearing.

In a sense, it's even simpler than that, just two concepts; frequency and amplitude, as distortion is encompassed by frequency a amplitude. However, I think it's important to discuss both perception (emotional response) and measurements/the science. The important thing is knowing which is appropriate. Perception and emotional response for the music and science for the equipment. Most of the arguments here on HeadFi occur when people use the inappropriate concept, for example; discussing electronic equipment in terms of emotional response.

Rroseperry - I think it very unlikely that we will be able to model the human brain accurately when it comes to perception and emotional response, at the very least for the foreseeable future, if ever. The problem being that even though the main structures of the brain are very similar from person to person, the memories and experience of every person is different and our perception of the world is therefore different (see my last post). For example I can record the sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard and most of us would agree that it's a horrible sound but not everybody, some people actually like it. Some like the massive distortion of heavy metal and some prefer a complete lack of distortion in classical music and some actually like both genres. Although we can make some generalisations about perception and use these to create musical illusions, these generalised "rules" only ever apply for a percentage of humans. It's virtually impossible to construct any useful model with so few concrete rules.

G

 

[rroseperry]

In a sense, it's even simpler than that, just two concepts; frequency and amplitude, as distortion is encompassed by frequency a amplitude. However, I think it's important to discuss both perception (emotional response) and measurements/the science. The important thing is knowing which is appropriate. Perception and emotional response for the music and science for the equipment. Most of the arguments here on HeadFi occur when people use the inappropriate concept, for example; discussing electronic equipment in terms of emotional response.

Rroseperry - I think it very unlikely that we will be able to model the human brain accurately when it comes to perception and emotional response, at the very least for the foreseeable future, if ever. The problem being that even though the main structures of the brain are very similar from person to person, the memories and experience of every person is different and our perception of the world is therefore different (see my last post). For example I can record the sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard and most of us would agree that it's a horrible sound but not everybody, some people actually like it. Some like the massive distortion of heavy metal and some prefer a complete lack of distortion in classical music and some actually like both genres. Although we can make some generalisations about perception and use these to create musical illusions, these generalised "rules" only ever apply for a percentage of humans. It's virtually impossible to construct any useful model with so few concrete rules.

G

I suspect that we won't be able to model a specific person, but I think we could get a better idea about how emotions and feelings are generated within brains. What we probably will never be able to do is understand how specific histories, experience, and maybe genetics lead different people to love or loathe different sounds and other sensations.

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

In a sense, it's even simpler than that, just two concepts; frequency and amplitude, as distortion is encompassed by frequency a amplitude.

G

Gregorio- I think you're confusing describing a signal with modeling a behavior. A signal can be described as containing certain frequencies and amplitudes. A behavior is much more complex than that. If you are talking here about a transfer function of a linear system as described by frequency and amplitude, then that is a model of a behavior, but one that assumes the device is linear, which it never is.
 
Regarding illusion, you don't give any evidence of having read my prior post. I'll give it one more try. Let's draw an analogy from an optical illusion. I don't remember the details, but there is some kind of disk with black-and-white patterns that, when spun, gives the illusion of color. If you watch this disk in person and see the illusion, and then videotape it and see the illusion on your TV, then the video camera and TV are sufficiently transparent for the purposes of conveying the illusion.
 
Or take Shepard's tones, the illusion of an infinitely rising pitch. Say we set up a Shepard's tones demonstration using live instruments (tricky but good players could pull it off). We hear this illusion live. Then we record it and play it on speakers. If we still hear the illusion, then the recording chain is sufficiently transparent to convey the illusion.
 

 
 
 

 

[Elysian]

Not to be snarky, but isn't there another forum over there that also starts with the word head, where people do post graphs of frequencies and other measureables?  They also do a nice job analyzing how a particular piece of gear would fit into a given setup, given how essential it is to analyze the entire chain.
 
I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with the idea that accuracy = enjoyment.  There are pro forums dedicated to getting the most accurate output possible, and even those guys state repeatedly that their goal is not to have a studio eargasm.  If they were listening for fun, they'd be using different gear and likely an entirely different setup.
 
The reviews on HF are fun because people get caught up in their emotional reaction to their equipment.  If you're worried about not liking your gear, you should buy it from someplace with a return policy.  Otherwise, it seems like a lot of this kvetching is because people get defensive about their expenditure.  It's useful when technical folks here call out outright falsifications from certain vendors, but I'm not sure what's behind this rage some people have towards flowery reviews, particularly given that HF is a free, non-professional community.

 

[bigshot]

I have worked in production sound and I certainly want accuracy in my home setup. I may not demand the same degree of calibration because I am only listening and not recording at home, and I have to make compromises to create a livable space for my stereo, but I still want it to be reasonably accurate.
 
I don't believe anyone who knows what they're doing would choose colored presentation "for fun". Balanced response is the most "fun" sound you can get.