[anetode]

Quote:

Watch this: McGurk Effect

 
In my top five of favorite perceptual illusions. Has nothing to do whatsoever with the rest of what you said.

 

[gregorio]

Stuff in people's heads is real.
 
The only way you can know if it succeeds at being transparent is to listen to it.
 

You are Joking I hope? The McGurk Effect is proof that what is in your head and what you think you hear is NOT real. The reality is, there was only one word, your brain created a false reality in believing there were two. Your hearing can actually be fooled relatively easily. For this reason, the ONLY way to test for transparency is to measure what goes in, measure what comes out and compare the measurements.

How you perceive it is the ONLY way to judge whether what comes out is equal to what went in.

This is a completely bizarre statement. It's an extremely difficult problem to measure the degree of emotion in someone's voice, but trivial to record it and trivial for anyone to experience it.

You're probably going to say something about how audio systems don't make art, etc.-- but they have the job of reproducing it, and they influence it and change it, so in point of fact they do make art. At the high-end level, measurements have not proven to be very useful at predicting how a device will influence and change the art you put through it.

Are you joking too? An audio system records and reproduces sound waves. Sound waves do not have any emotion, they are just sound waves. Sound systems cannot measure or record emotion, only sound waves. Any emotion you perceive from listening to sound waves are a creation of your brain, not part of the sound waves. The same as the word "Far" was not part of the sound waves in the video clip I linked to. I'll say it again, If we cannot measure it (and we can't measure emotions in a recording studio) then we cannot record it and your system cannot reproduce it. You watch a tragedy film with your girlfriend and she starts crying, ask her why. I can pretty much guarantee you she will not say "those photons emitted from your television were just so sad". Photons, like sound waves, do not have or contain emotions. Emotions exist only in your head!

As a music creator, I can decide what frequencies and amplitudes of sound waves to record which I know (or hope) will create some sort of emotional response in the listener but the recording equipment doesn't know that. The recording equipment can't tell the difference between the greatest musical masterpiece ever written and a dog farting, it's just sound waves. A piece of wood is just a piece of wood, until a sculptor turns it into a work of art, at which point the piece of wood doesn't say to itself "**** I have to make everyone who looks at me feel happy from now on" and change it's behaviour. The piece of wood is still just a piece of wood, it's how people perceive it which has changed. The concept of art and of judgements of beauty and quality are a solely human invention and exist purely in our brains, not in reality and certainly not in sound waves.

G

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

 The concept of art and of judgements of beauty and quality are a solely human invention and exist purely in our brains, not in reality and certainly not in sound waves.


 

I don't think you understand what I'm saying because this statement has nothing to do with it.
 
Quote:

You are Joking I hope? The McGurk Effect is proof that what is in your head and what you think you hear is NOT real

 
From time to time people bring up optical/aural illusions as "proof" that transparency is not about perception. But illusions are totally irrelevant. If you want to make a relevant comparison, this is the proper way to think about it--
 
You know the optical illusion where you spin a black-and-white disk with a pattern on it, and you see color? First do that illusion live, in person. Then videotape it and watch it on the screen. If you see the same illusion then you know the video camera was sufficiently transparent. And watching it to check is the ONLY ultimate judge of that sufficient transparency.
 
Now about this statement "beauty/quality don't exist in sound waves"-- that is a red herring. The actual point is that a system which changes the sound waves changes the perception. And the ONLY ultimate evaluation of whether a system is adequately transparent is perception.
 
I also think you must be joking to claim measurements are relevant to anything divorced from the concept of perception.
 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

In other words, you play a recording of you voice and can tell it's male or female. You ask a computer to plot the frequencies played by that recording and graph them. Judging by the frequencies, you can tell that it's male or female, if you know enough about the measurements to do so.

You are missing the point. You claim that "we can measure everything" as though that were an obvious statement. You probably think that 24 bit/96 KHz equipment can measure more than 16 bit/44.1 KHz equipment. I'm showing why that is false with a fairly easy-to-grasp example, but it only gets more difficult from there when you start listing all the things we can easily perceive which we don't have measurements for.
 
 

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

You are missing the point. You claim that "we can measure everything" as though that were an obvious statement. You probably think that 24 bit/96 KHz equipment can measure more than 16 bit/44.1 KHz equipment. I'm showing why that is false with a fairly easy-to-grasp example, but it only gets more difficult from there when you start listing all the things we can easily perceive which we don't have measurements for.

So in your example, what couldn't we measure?

 

[ffdpmaggot]

Mike, either I'm just stupid, or your just throwing in "big words" for the sake of making your argument sound more credible and well thought out than it is. I'm guessing its some combination of the two. Anyway, I don't care about this perception / reality nonsense, it sounds like your using an argument markedly similar to the one that the high end cable crowd uses to defend their case when high end cables are proven to make 0 difference in sound quality. The purpose of a good test for a piece of hi fi audio gear is to see how close it comes to the sound the producer originally intended. Nobody ever implied that measurements will tell you how realistic violins sound on a given piece of equipment, just that those measurements will tell you how close the equipment stays to the sound that the engineer wanted you to hear. 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

So in your example, what couldn't we measure?

 
Personally, I don't think we have measures for how well equipment reproduces musical feeling-- that real stuff that musicians study and work together to produce. But another point which even you should agree with is that it is ridiculous to say "we can measure everything" as though that were a trivial statement. You didn't provide any algorithm for telling the approximate age of a speaker, you just assumed it can be done. And that's just one of many things we easily perceive. To back up the claim "we can measure everything" you need to provide an algorithm for literally everything that humans can perceive.

 
 
 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

Anyway, I don't care about this perception / reality nonsense, it sounds like your using an argument markedly similar to the one that the high end cable crowd uses to defend their case when high end cables are proven to make 0 difference in sound quality. The purpose of a good test for a piece of hi fi audio gear is to see how close it comes to the sound the producer originally intended. Nobody ever implied that measurements will tell you how realistic violins sound on a given piece of equipment, just that those measurements will tell you how close the equipment stays to the sound that the engineer wanted you to hear.
 
Quote:

 

 

 
 
 
Quote:

your using an argument markedly similar to the one that the high end cable crowd uses to defend their case when high end cables are proven to make 0 difference in sound quality.

No, what I'm saying applies just as much to devices with non-controversial amounts of distortion. How do you tell which of two headphones , A and B, sounds more transparent? The ultimate judge, the reference against which all measurements must be evaluated tentatively, is listening.
Quote:

Nobody ever implied that measurements will tell you how realistic violins sound on a given piece of equipment, just that those measurements will tell you how close the equipment stays to the sound that the engineer wanted you to hear.

The ultimate judge of that is listening. As soon as you say "the sound the engineer wanted you to hear", what you mean is the perception the engineer wanted you to perceive. If you think there is any reality to the idea of "sound he wanted you to hear," any reality to measurements of that divorced from the context of perception, you are really being silly.
 

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

Personally, I don't think we have measures for how well equipment reproduces musical feeling-- that real stuff that musicians study and work together to produce. But another point which even you should agree with is that it is ridiculous to say "we can measure everything" as though that were a trivial statement. You didn't provide any algorithm for telling the approximate age of a speaker, you just assumed it can be done. And that's just one of many things we easily perceive. To back up the claim "we can measure everything" you need to provide an algorithm for literally everything that humans can perceive.

"Musical feeling" is in the music itself. It's a combination of the tempo, the notes played, volume, effects like echoes, and everything else that is captured on the recording. All of that is measurable. How much you enjoy the music is subjective, and relates to each individual. That comes after the recording. We don't need to measure that because it acts independently of the equipment. We only want to measure what the equipment can produce, not everything each individual perceives. Everything that comes after the audio reproduction chain, that is everything after the sound waves enter the ear canal, is not what we're interested in.
 
So what was all of that crap about male and female voices? You seemed to drop that point fast, which was the example I was talking about. Do you have any more examples for things which are supposedly not measurable within the reproduction chain? If "musicality" is all you can muster, you're not going to make much of an impression here.

 

[ffdpmaggot]

Quote:

 
 
 
No, what I'm saying applies just as much to devices with non-controversial amounts of distortion. How do you tell which of two headphones , A and B, sounds more transparent? The ultimate judge, the reference against which all measurements must be evaluated tentatively, is listening.
The ultimate judge of that is listening. As soon as you say "the sound the engineer wanted you to hear", what you mean is the perception the engineer wanted you to perceive. If you think there is any reality to the idea of "sound he wanted you to hear," any reality to measurements of that divorced from the context of perception, you are really being silly.
 

I see. I would argue that just listening to a piece of gear to tell how transparent it is, is even sillier. "Transparency" is essentially how close a piece of gear comes to replicating the sound in such a way that you perceive it as the engineer had perceived it. Unless you have access to the monitors the engineer used to mix, you cant know how he intended for it to sound, and you need to be able to compensate for all of the tiny differences in head acoustics.

 

[mike1127]

 
Quote:

"Musical feeling" is in the music itself. It's a combination of the tempo, the notes played, volume, effects like echoes, and everything else that is captured on the recording. All of that is measurable.

What you are probably saying is that if we have two waveforms, A and B, and we all agree they have different feeling, and then we measure A and B, we will easily discover they are different waveforms. But that is not the same as measuring perceptual qualities of the waveform.
 
What you will discover if you study musical interpretation is that musical feeling is in the relationships between the durations of notes, the volume of notes, the change of timbre over time, etc. What you have not done is provide an algorithm to evaluate the relevant relationships. Measuring a waveform and listing each sample taken does nothing.
 
Quote:

If "musicality" is all you can muster, you're not going to make much of an impression here.

 
Then I would say you are ignoring reality. I don't know why you don't want to follow your implications all the way through, but you aren't.
 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

Unless you have access to the monitors the engineer used to mix, you cant know how he intended for it to sound, and you need to be able to compensate for all of the tiny differences in head acoustics.

As far as lack of access to the monitors the engineer used, that's a separate issue. If we DO have access, then it's easier to put this experiment on a solid footing. And that experiment must be done via listening.
 

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

What you are probably saying is that if we have two waveforms, A and B, and we all agree they have different feeling, and then we measure A and B, we will easily discover they are different waveforms. But that is not the same as measuring perceptual qualities of the waveform.
 
What you will discover if you study musical interpretation is that musical feeling is in the relationships between the durations of notes, the volume of notes, the change of timbre over time, etc. What you have not done is provide an algorithm to evaluate the relevant relationships. Measuring a waveform and listing each sample taken does nothing.
 
Then I would say you are ignoring reality. I don't know why you don't want to follow your implications all the way through, but you aren't.

Alright, it's obvious to me now you don't actually read arguments against you. I won't waste my time making any more, then. Thanks for ruining a good thread 

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

Alright, it's obvious to me now you don't actually read arguments against you. I won't waste my time making any more, then. Thanks for ruining a good thread 

 
I keep trying to get you to grasp what I'm saying, which I don't think you have.
 

 

[ffdpmaggot]

Quote:

Alright, it's obvious to me now you don't actually read arguments against you. I won't waste my time making any more, then. Thanks for ruining a good thread 

I thought he was making it a great thread. I don't agree with him but I like to see a different thought process than my own or ones similar to my own.