[RazorJack]

Interesting to read how audio subjectivists have to resort to dodging the issue at hand when their vague beliefs and statements eventually catches up with them.
 
I'd disagree to close this thread if such a decision were to be made, fwiw.

 

[proton007]

  Interesting to read how audio subjectivists have to resort to dodging the issue at hand when their vague beliefs and statements eventually catches up with them.
 
I'd disagree to close this thread if such a decision were to be made, fwiw.

 
I don't want the thread to be closed down, but its a waste of everyone's time if there's no direction.

 

[bigshot]

We live in a world which is an approximation of the completely abstract and completely accurate.

 
Buddhists may disagree, but reality is by definition perfectly accurate. Perception is flawed. This whole thread keeps proving that over and over..

 

[bigshot]

   
Like echos / reverb from room interaction that affects some frequencies different than others where you have some rhythmic elements at some frequency and others at another?

 
Two completely different scales of order. For an echo to mess with rhythm, your listening room would have to be on the top of the Swiss Alps. No living room will ever be that far off.

 

[bigshot]

  Some of you may have seen one of those waterfall plots of a speaker's impulse response... it takes an event (an impulse) and slices it into time steps, analyzing the distribution of spectral energy at each step. You could do that sort of thing with any event, not just an impulse. You could do it with the attack of a clarinet note, or the beat of a drum.

 
You could, but it would be like comparing an ant to an elephant. The most important part of any chart isn't the wiggly lines, it's the numbers running along the side. Those are what tell you if you're talking about a breeze or a typhoon.

 

[raddle]

There's nothing vague about what I'm saying from the perspective of someone with musical training. It's interesting how such training alters one's perspective on the science. You see the assumptions in the science. It changes your idea of what a valid study is.
 
For example that New Yorker article on rhythm. It admitted that the test was done with a touchpad rather than a drum, which could alter the test. Any drummer could tell you that. Furthermore there's an assumption that the PERCEPTION of even rhythm is equivalent to OBJECTIVELY EVEN rhythm. In other words, when they told the drummers to drum "evenly" the expectation was that the rhythm would MEASURE even. But that equivalence is simply assumed by the scientists, not investigated or proven. The drummer very well could be creating an uneven pattern for a specific rhythmic effect. The "unevenness" might be very controlled and regular. The article failed to describe if anyone investigated that.
 
For that matter, there's a lot of misunderstanding in this forum about rhythmic quality. Every person on this thread (BigShot, etc.) who says that speakers can't affect the perception of rhythm is failing to appreciate the difference between OBJECTIVELY MEASURED events, and the PERCEPTION of those events (which can be altered by something as simple as tonal balance). Is there any study on rhythmic quality? Show it to me.
 
I'm very interested in scientific studies and everything I've described can potentially be investigated. Do you disagree with any of these ideas? Show me the studies that discredit them. Pick any idea I've put forth here and try to discredit it. I'm all ears.
 
The articles that hivbiguyvd posted to try to discredit me were all based on a misunderstanding. He thought that a study about the question of whether two events "unite in the brain" is saying something about rhythmic quality, which it isn't. He thought that this experiment with drummers proved that their timing is uncontrolled by 10 ms or that 10ms variation doesn't affect perception. It doesn't say that.

 

[raddle]

   
Two completely different scales of order. For an echo to mess with rhythm, your listening room would have to be on the top of the Swiss Alps. No living room will ever be that far off.

An echo does mess with RHYTHMIC QUALITY. A musician chooses their tempo in part based on the quality of the hall reverb. If you make a recording and your recording alters the perceived balance of hall reverb to direct sound (something easy to do depending on mic placement and mic polar sensitivity) then you alter the music.
 
Alter the details and you alter the emergent qualities.

 

[raddle]

  You've missed the point. Every time you say "Objectivists say X" or "Lots of people here X", who are these people you are referring to?
 

 
I would agree that it's not a good idea to lump people together--yes, everyone has different beliefs, so there is no single category of "objectivists." However, you've missed my point which is that many people have this paradigm which divides up "music making" and "music reproduction." Certain phenomena are put in the category of "music making" and deemed irrelevant to accurate reproduction. I'm challenging that paradigm by pointing out it's based on assumptions that are contradicted by the experience of musicians.
 
I would rather spend my time making music and developing my understanding from a first-person perspective than looking up things in journals. Perhaps anything posted in Sound Science should be backed by studies or else deemed off-topic. Perhaps my thread is off-topic. Is there any general agreement in this forum that all claims should be backed by studies? Is anyone interested in the perspective of musicians or is that deemed off-topic?

 

[raddle]

   
You could, but it would be like comparing an ant to an elephant. The most important part of any chart isn't the wiggly lines, it's the numbers running along the side. Those are what tell you if you're talking about a breeze or a typhoon.

You're not interested in characterizing instrument sounds? I've analyzed the evolving spectra of violins (using sound sample in a particular sample library, Vienna Orchestra) in order to synthesize a violin-like sound. It was a nice project. It revealed something about the importance of the non-harmonic energy in the violin sample.

 

[bigshot]

A minute ago you were talking about time errors and waterfall plots reflecting changes in rhythm. Now you say it's tonal balance altering your perception of rhythm. That's all well and good, but your perception doesn't mean much to me when it comes to putting together my own stereo system. Sometimes simply listening and answering straightforwardly is better than constantly wiggling around in your arguments and resorting to solipsism to make your point. I guess if your purpose in this forum is to write poetry about music and sound, this thread is meaningful to you. But I'm here to learn about techniques for better sound that don't require me listening with your ears.
 
This is why subjectivism is a dead end. I'm honestly not interested in how people FEEL when they listen to their stereo. I want to know how to remove imbalances and noise from my own system. That requires objective research and application of scientific principles. If you want to shift to the music forum, I'd be happy to discuss aesthetics. But this is Sound Science, and no offense, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why you've expended so much energy on an argument that in this particular forum is pretty pointless.

 

[bigshot]

 
You're not interested in characterizing instrument sounds?

 
Sure. In the realm of sound reproduction that's all about frequency response and removing imbalances so masking doesn't cover up the harmonics that give an instrument its character. To a lesser degree, it's about accurately reproducing dynamics and the envelope of attack and decay.

 

[bigshot]

 
An echo does mess with RHYTHMIC QUALITY. A musician chooses their tempo in part based on the quality of the hall reverb.

 
That is a function of the recording venue, not the playback chain. You were talking about speakers in a home stereo, not a concert hall. remember?

 

[bigshot]

  I would rather spend my time making music and developing my understanding from a first-person perspective than looking up things in journals. Perhaps anything posted in Sound Science should be backed by studies or else deemed off-topic. Perhaps my thread is off-topic.

 
You think it might be?

 

[raddle]

   
This is why subjectivism is a dead end. I'm honestly not interested in how people FEEL when they listen to their stereo. I want to know how to remove imbalances and noise from my own system. That requires objective research and application of scientific principles. If you want to shift to the music forum, I'd be happy to discuss aesthetics. But this is Sound Science, and no offense, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why you've expended so much energy on an argument that in this particular forum is pretty pointless.

 
Your system is not perfect. I've already listed sources of distortion, the major one being that you aren't reproducing the 3D sound field that was present in the hall.
 
As long as your system is distorting the music, you are distorting the aesthetics. Distort the details and you distort the emergent properties. To draw a line between them and say aesthetics is irrelevant to reproduction is a dead end.

 

[mikeaj]

A whole lot of posts seem to be dedicated to either clarifying (e.g. not rhythm, talking about a more subjective and vaguely defined rhythmic quality) or completely redefining definitions.
 
For example, I don't think it's clear from the onset that "rhythm" would have to do with things other than timing. Even when a musician says the rhythm is off, that is referring to the timing, not the articulation or something else.