[mike1127]

This is a post about listening styles. It is related to comparisons, sighted or blind, and the duration of audio memory.

There are many ways to listen to music.. just look at how people talk about sound. Some will structure a review by talking about bass, midrange, and treble. Some will talk about dynamics and microdynamics. Some will talk about musicality.

May I point out that how we experience music is not entirely in the sound? Am I making any sense?---music is sound. But some of our _reactions_ to sound occur in our _emotions_ and in _body movement_ (toe-tapping, or even subtle imagined dance).

Sometimes I don't say I'm "listening" to music--I say I'm "feeling" music.

You can also focus on "sound as sound"---you can turn your attention away from emotions and body movements, and into aspects of the sound like "brightness," "smoothness," etc. Our culture has a huge range of adjectives that describe the "sound as sound."

When doing comparisons, for some reason it is tempting to notice sound only, maybe even a kind of hyper-focus on the sound as sound.

After a lot of years, my listening style in comparisons is changing. I try instead to keep "feeling" the music---and compare that. Sometimes I move my hands as though they were conducting, or more precisely dancing to, the music. Differences in equipment often show up when I move my hands a different way. Or for completely un-involving equipment, I don't feel like moving my hands at all.

Scientists say are audio memory is short. But I think they are talking about focus on the sound as sound. I try to remember the whole experience---the sound, the feelings, and the dance. With practice, I think I can remember these over time spans ranging from a few minutes to weeks (depending on how large the differences are).

 

[Roger Strummer]

 
This and your other thread raise some very interesting and valid points. 
 
The thing that immediately came to my mind is that you are adding a lot of complexity and variance when you are talking about the experience memory instead of the auditory memory. 
 
Let me explain what I'm trying to say, the experience when hearing a particular song in a particular equipment is not only dependent on those two factors. It is dependent (and I would argue that it is heavily dependent) on other factors that affect your emotions even if they are not directly connected to the song or the equipment (ie they did not alter the song or equipment or even your ears). For example if you are sad due to a personal experience, a song with content that relates to that experience will make you identify with it and so it will (probably) produce a heavily emotional response independent of what equipment you use to hear it. And that is fundamental to the experience, so if some time later the same song doesn't produce the same experience might have nothing to do with the equipment or the song, but all with you. 
 
And there are a lot of factors that affect our experiences at any given time (that go from external, hormonal, physical, etc), that introduce a lot of variance that affect the reliability. My point is for example say you analyze a piece of equipment during two weeks, and the next two weeks you analyze the same equipment, then there is a big probability that the experiences won't be the same due to external factors. 
 
Even time of day comes into factor, in the morning your ears are more sensitive to sound pressure (assuming a quiet night sleeping) than in the night, particularly if you have a loud job or live in a city, which can affect how you perceive your equipment. It is the same effect when going to a rock concert and hearing everything else awfully quiet, just in a more gradual way.
 
Now I'm not saying that what you say is not valid, but my point is that the variance is so big that dealing with experience memory is even more difficult than the already conflicting reports of people when trying to focus only in the sound.
 
Anyways this are only my first thoughts to what you said, this might be a very interesting thread/debate.

 

[mike1127]

It's definitely a point that human experiences outside "sound as sound" can be influenced by non-musical factors. But if we say, "Therefore testing should be done on 'sound as sound' (i.e. any factor that could be influenced by the mood you're in is eliminated)," unfortunately that kind of test, to be valid, assumes those factors are truly irrelevant.
 
Note that composers don't have to be in a sad mood to write sad music; performers don't have to be sad in order to play exquisitely sad music. There is some separation of musical feeling from mood. I grew up in a family of musicians, and I don't think it ever occurred to us that we had to be sad to play sad music. One time I heard a "music appreciation lecture" and the guy said he constantly got asked questions like, "But how could Mozart continue work on his tragic opera if he wasn't sad that day?" so I first became aware of that misunderstanding.
 
Likewise, I think that experienced listeners can assess the feeling in music independently of their mood. I'm not saying they do it perfectly. I'm not saying we have a way to control their experience of feeling to the level of precision that a scientific measurement requires.

 

 

[royalcrown]

 
Quote:

Sometimes I don't say I'm "listening" to music--I say I'm "feeling" music.
 
...

You can also focus on "sound as sound"---you can turn your attention away from emotions and body movements, and into aspects of the sound like "brightness," "smoothness," etc. Our culture has a huge range of adjectives that describe the "sound as sound."

When doing comparisons, for some reason it is tempting to notice sound only, maybe even a kind of hyper-focus on the sound as sound.

After a lot of years, my listening style in comparisons is changing. I try instead to keep "feeling" the music---and compare that. Sometimes I move my hands as though they were conducting, or more precisely dancing to, the music. Differences in equipment often show up when I move my hands a different way. Or for completely un-involving equipment, I don't feel like moving my hands at all.

Scientists say are audio memory is short. But I think they are talking about focus on the sound as sound. I try to remember the whole experience---the sound, the feelings, and the dance. With practice, I think I can remember these over time spans ranging from a few minutes to weeks (depending on how large the differences are).

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 problematic because that kind of a review is absolutely useless: it tells us more about yourself than about the actual piece of equipment. If your day is going well, your "emotional response" to a given piece of music will fluctuate accordingly: you may ascribe your statement of "I don't feel like moving my hands at all" to the actual piece of audio equipment, but for all anyone knows (and for all you know), you could just be having a bad day that day. It's implausible to think that we have control over our emotions to any degree, and even more so to think that we have awareness of the nuances of our emotional states. The "whole experience" is determined by far more than just the audio equipment - it encompasses all sorts of things. However, I (as a reader of a review) don't really care about the other things, I only care about the audio equipment. If you claim that a piece of audio equipment made you dance in a review, I'm not being told anything about the equipment as much as I'm told how much you felt like dancing when you did that review.
 
However, at least in theory, focusing on the "sound as sound" allows us to abstract the audio component from everything else - if you're a reliable judge of audio components, and you label the sound as bright, the component should (in theory) sound bright every time you listen to the music. If it doesn't, then external biases are almost certainly the culprit, as opposed to any other factor. Granted, there are plenty of arguments that such a goal is unattainable: but this points more to the necessity of blind testing (to remove this personal bias in the first instance) than it does to another "style" of reviewing. After all, as you write, "how we experience music is not entirely in the sound." 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.

 

[Roger Strummer]

Quote:

It's definitely a point that human experiences outside "sound as sound" can be influenced by non-musical factors. But if we say, "Therefore testing should be done on 'sound as sound' (i.e. any factor that could be influenced by the mood you're in is eliminated)," unfortunately that kind of test, to be valid, assumes those factors are truly irrelevant.
 
 
To produce a categorical result (for example: cables do not make any audible difference), it would have to assume the irrelevance of the factors.
 
But to produce a non-categorical result (for example: there is lack of evidence to support the fact that cables make audible difference), it doesn't need to say those factors are irrelevant, it just tries to remove those factors from the test, since one tries to focus on the cable (or whatever the object being tested) only, and those factors have inherently the subjectivity of the participant, and so they give results about the cable and the subject at the same time, when the goal was to remove the subjective part from the test.
 
So the tests of "sound as sound" are valid, but they are not the last word, they just make us suspicious  due to their negative results, and the more negative results, with better tests preferably, augment the doubts. The same reasoning would apply for reviews, as royalcrown said.
 
 
 
 
Note that composers don't have to be in a sad mood to write sad music; performers don't have to be sad in order to play exquisitely sad music. There is some separation of musical feeling from mood. I grew up in a family of musicians, and I don't think it ever occurred to us that we had to be sad to play sad music. One time I heard a "music appreciation lecture" and the guy said he constantly got asked questions like, "But how could Mozart continue work on his tragic opera if he wasn't sad that day?" so I first became aware of that misunderstanding.
 
Comparing different things. The creation of artistic pieces is a different activity than the reception/consumption of those pieces. But aside from that nit-picking, your point is valid, you don't have to be in a particular mood to appreciate (or write) a song,  but it can (heavily) influence the experience, we agree in this I think. 
 
 
Likewise, I think that experienced listeners can assess the feeling in music independently of their mood. I'm not saying they do it perfectly. I'm not saying we have a way to control their experience of feeling to the level of precision that a scientific measurement requires.
 
Here you are saying the exact same I was trying to say, we agree in this point, the lack of control makes it unsuitable for scientific purposes (which is different than personal purposes). But the inherent subjectivity of the whole experience makes it also of limited use for other people at best, since you are talking about the reaction you had, which almost surely will be different from the exact reaction of another person.

 

Anyways, I think agree with royalcrown's post (which has a lot in common with what I just said). The introduction of the subject (in the way of describing the personal experience) into the review or evaluation of equipment introduces so much variability that the usefulness of the tests gets very limited, for both other persons purposes and scientific purposes, since it would be indistinguishable whether there is a difference in the sound produced by the equipment or the difference is in the subject.

 

[mike1127]

Hi Roger and royalcrown,
 
I replied to your posts on the "Brain Company" thread, because I wanted to reference my "military hierarchy" model.
 
http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/505513/brain-company
 
Thanks,
Mike

 

[Prog Rock Man]

With regards to audio memory. It is sometimes argued that blind testing is invalidated because our audio memory is poor. But if that is true, how come I am able to talk and understand others as well? If my audio memory was poor, I would not be able to do language. If anything our audio memory is excellent. We can not only remember what thousands of different sounds relate to, but we can pick out differences within each sound. For example recognising your own cats miaow or someone you have not seen for years if they call out to you.
 
Certain jobs benefit from a good ear. Musicians often have even better memory for sound in that they can tell pitch, tone etc. I am no musician, but I can tell if something is out of tune. Mechanics can listen to an engine and diagnose issues just by ear.
 
My tester tracks for auditioning kit have specific qualities. Does the bass distort? How clear is a background noise? How tizzy are the cymbals? I can remember those tracks from one year to the next.
 
I think that when people say that a blind test is invalid because your memory of the music is too poor, what is actually the case is that there is little to no difference between the music samples. But rather than accept that they say your memory is poor. So actually the blind test is valid, it is just that the music samples sound the same.

 

[mike1127]

I agree this thread should be merged with the "Brain Company" thread. Anyone know how to contact a moderator to do that?