[Harry Lavo]

"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message
...
Harry Lavo wrote:
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message
...
Harry Lavo wrote:
I would like to recommend that everybody buy this book, now available
in
paperback for only $15 cover price. It is by Oliver Sacks, a
practicing
physician in NYC who is also Professor of Neurology and Psychology at
Columbia University Medical Center. He is the author in the past of
Awakenings, among nine previous books.

The book illustrates (in a highly readable way) the awesome
complexity,importance, and integration of music to human beings from a
neurological standpoint. It is simply impossible to read this book
and
continue to consider that all we need to know about audio, the ear,
and
the
brain was turned into "settled science" 50 years ago and that music is
just
a form of sound, as some here have claimed. For one thing, most of
the
scientific work in this area was not even started until the early
'80's.

So we have...'only' a quarter century of work on the psychology of
music
perception?

No, we 'only' have a quarter century of beginning to understand what
really
goes on in the brain with regard to music.


Of course, no one's EVER said 'all we need to know about audio, the
ear,
and brain'
is 'settled science' as of today. What has been said is that we DO
know
some
things about hearing with considerable confidence, and these things we
DO
know are often relevant as a reality check to the torrential claims of
difference
made by audio 'subjectivists'.

Here is but one of many examples, uttered right here on RAHE, that falls
into this category:

"But if you're trying to compare two audio reproduction systems, it can
be
much more effective to listen
to and immediately compare much shorter snippets of sounds,
particularly
sounds that are notoriously challenging to reproduce. This
isn't speculation. It's settled science among those who study human
perception for a living. It's only rejected by the anti-empiricist
fringe in the audiophile world." May 28, 2005 Bob Marcus

If you read the book and think about some of its implications, it is easy
to
see how and why some of the above assertion may not prove to be true in
some
ways. So the science may be "settled" only in the sense that some of the
right questions have yet to be asked.

Pardon, does Sacks present evidence that short audition samples AREN'T
better for
audible difference validation of gear? Does he address audio DBT
methodology directly? If not,
what implications are you drawing from his book, about DBT methods, if
any?

My exposure to music perception studies... some personal, as I took a
seminar with Dr. Diana
Deutsch back in my college days (late 70's) -- is that it is not about
determining whether
differences between different pieces of music -- differences in tempo,
mode, harmonic and
large-scale structure, etc -- are REAL and AUDIBLE per se. It is
concerned with how we
perceive them and what effects those differences have on our subjective
experience of the
music.


I have not read Sacks' book, but have read Levitin's "This Is Your
Brain
On Music'
-- which I would bet is AT LEAST as scientifically informed as Sacks'
book,
if not more -- and I don't see that study of music perception is
particularly relevant
to audio gear, EXCEPT perhpas when the gear itself is adding audible
components to the
signal --i.e., acting as a crude 'musical instrument'. Which is more
typical of analog
gear than digital.

I am not looking to get engaged in a "Battle of the Books". The one
you
cite may or may not cover the same ground as the one I cite. I'm not
sure
on what basis you emphasize "AT LEAST" and "EXCEPT" when you have not
read
the book I recommended.

I am basing my *bet* the AT LEAST on what I know of Sacks and his
previous books, some of
which I have read (and I've read reviews of Musicophilia), and the EXCEPT
from logic.

************************************************** ******

There is no point in getting into a detailed discusion until/unless you read
the book. Sacks does mention findings which indicate that musicians and
people heavily involved with music have brains that develop differently and
do have longer musical memories. But he is not writing a book about audio
measurement or audibility. The book raises questions that pertain to our
interest...it doesn't directly deal with those interests. The real value is
the questions it raises, not the answers it gives.