"Harry Lavo" wrote in message ...
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Only sound? There is no music until the
brain has processed the sound and interpreted it as music. And that is the
primary reason music reproduction is not simply electrical and physical
engineering. Their is no way to measure *music*. Ultimately whether the
music strikes our brain as right, or the brain tells us something is amiss,
is not "objectively" measurable. The only way to objectify it is by
allowing humans to interpret it as music, and then to develop tests to try
to record that *subjective* response in ways that can generate some
*objective* results in the statistical sense. And there is the rub. It
demands context for the brain to interpret what is going on. Let me give
you a non-musical example that I use here before...about a year and a half
ago, I think.

Hmmm, I smell a bad analogy coming on...

Suppose you hear a split second of a car crash. That's all...half a second
of indecipherable noise. You wouldn't even know what it was. However, if
you heard a recording of street sounds, and auto approaching, a squeal of
tires, and then the crash, you would know what you were hearing. And if you
heard it through two different systems you could probably which one sounded
"most real".

Actually, you probably couldn't, unless one of the systems was
grotesquely bad. That's why ABX and ABC/hr tests NEVER ask subjects to
compare a sound to something they've remembered. ALL comparison sounds
are immediately available. And that's why this analogy is wrong.

However, if all your heard were two snippets of sound of the
crash itself, my guess is your brain would be trying so hard to make sense
of what you were hearing you couldn't evaluate anything in the way of which
sounded most "real" because you didn't know what "real" was.

Let's keep in mind this concern of Harry's about what sounds most
"real," because he stumbles over it later on.

Something similar happens with music but even more complex. Because
scientist now know that the brain is hardwired to respond to this thing we
call "music", both rhythmically and emotionally. Further the work done by
Oohashi et al (The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 83 No. 6 June 2000, pp.
3548-3558) indicated that this emotional response took place over time, as
much as twenty seconds of time, from the time of the sound.
Presumable this
is the time it takes the brain to recognize and interpret the music as
pleasurable, unpleasurable, rhythmically coherent or incoherent, etc.

I think you're stepping a bit beyond Oohashi's findings here, Harry,
and you really don't need to to make your point.

This fundamental fact means that you cannot measure "sound" and determine
its impact as "music". The factors affecting how we respond to music are
apparently very subtle and "time-based" and "harmony-based" and not static.
But a short burst comparison without much in the way of context for
recognition, relaxation, and response (which is the way most short-interval
testing is done) tends to short-circuit the process. This is the objection
must "subjectivists" have to ABX'ng in practice and why they question "null
results" that seem so at odds with so many people's otherwise fairly clear
perceptions of differences.

Oohashi also says that the subjects were not consciously aware of the
difference, so it's a little hard to see the connection between his
results and subjectivist claims.

Oohashi et al indicate in the quoted article that they have confirmed this
speculation. That is, they have used short-interval comparisons of music,
and found "no difference" in ratings in line with accepted believe. But
when using "long-intervals" using the same stimuli and sequentially monadic
ratings, the achieved statistically significant differences in response to
the two stimuli.

I don't think so, Harry. What they did was to do ABX-type tests using
short snippets of the music they were using, and found no difference.
So far as I can see, however, they did not use short snippets in their
monadic ratings.

You "amps is amps" people seem to want to ignore this finding, which is
pretty earthshaking and has nothing to do with whether you think the
"ultrasonic" portion of this test was done correctly or not, since
presumable the same stimulus was used in the precursor test (although to be
fair this should have been better documented in the article rather than
treated as almost a passing reference). This finding alone, if
substantiated by others, would rule out much of the abx and possibly most of
the dbt's done to date.

Huge leaps here. First, as I just noted, they don't seem to have done
the key comparison, which is applying the same test to both long and
short snippets. (That's not a criticism of them, by the way. You're
the one who's trying to make more of this research than is really
there.)

Second, there are a few huge gaps in the theory here, as Oohashi & co.
concede. In particular, there's the little matter of how this section
of the brain gets its information, since the normal hearing mechanism
cannot supply it. Also, there's the little matter of the data. Where
is it?

Then, as I also noted, the relevance of this to the experience of
subjectivists, listening sighted, is open to serious question. If
anything, this study confirms the necessity of DBTs, potentially
challenging only their methodologies.

Finally, I would note that Oohashi provides absolutely no evidence
that his subjects could tell which of the two samples was closer to
"real." One might interpret his results to suggest that they found one
more appealing than the other, but even that is hard given the lack of
data. For that matter, they have not excluded the possibility that the
inclusion of ultra-high-frequency noise, as opposed to harmonic
information, might be responsible for their results, or cause similar
ones.

In short, I'd say this study is interesting, and opens up some
possibilities that need to be explored more fully. But as I've made
clear before, I'm no expert in this field, so I'd defer to the
opinions of those who are. I recommend you do the same, Harry.

bob