After reading the first couple chapters of this book by Moore, I've
learned some interesting things.

While I can't make a direct claim at this time to know that cables and
digital/analog matter, I've been questioning the certainty of the
objectivists's knowledge. I've been wondering, How do we know what we
think we know about the limits of the ear's performance? My intuition
tells me that our knowledge of the ear's performance can't be isolated
from an understanding of consciousness.

The interesting thing is that the second chapter of the book, on the
perception of loudness, seems to go in this very direction.

For example, it discusses the experiments on absolute detection
thresholds of pure tones. This is a great "sandbox" to start our
discussion, because it involves everything we've been talking
about---objective measurements of a tone's loudness, and attempting to
get a report of the subject's conscious experience. It is a very
simple situation, working with only the simplest pure tones, and
working with a very simple feature of consciousness: "is it there or
not?"

The early experiments found a large variation in the threshold of
different people (20 dB). This raises the question: is the difference
due to different sensitivities in their ears, or a different
willingness to report hearing something on minimal sensory evidence?
No doubt partly due to each--but how would we know, for a given
subject, how much his deviation from the norm is due to his ear and how
much to "willingness to report"? This is hard to answer without
knowing something about the subject's conscious state.

Then there are the experiments to determine equal loudness curves.
This again is an attempt to connect an objective measurement to the
conscious perception of loudness. There is more than one way to do
this, and the different methods give conflicting results. The book
says "the techniques used seem very susceptible to bias effects, so
that the results are affected by factors such as (1) the range of
stimuli presented, (2) the first stimulus presented, (3) the
instructions to the subject," .. and several more factors "related to
experience, motivation, traning, and attention."

I'm not going to claim this proves my point, but it is certainly
analogous to the idea that the conditions of a blind test influence the
result.

Then remember all my blather about "modes of listening"? Well, do
they exist? Let me mention one point, which again is not meant to
prove modes of listening exist, but certainly is analgous to it. Some
scientists have made a theoretical objection to the notion of
evaluating loudness of pure tones, saying that in regular life people
judge the apparent loudness of a real sound source out in space and
can't reliably introspect about the sound pressure at the eardrum. To
quote Helmholtz:

"..we are exceedingly well trained in finding out by our sensations the
objective nature of the objects around us, but we are completely
unskilled in observing these sensations per se; and the practice of
associating them with things outside of us actually prevents us from
being distinctly conscious of the pure sensations."

This relates in a lot of ways to what I've been saying. I realize
there are still differences between this and what I've been saying
about blind tests, but there are analogies that make my ideas less
far-fetched.

First of all, the Moore book suggests that we could *try* to judge the
loudness of the tone in isolation of understanding it as a physical
sound source. So there's two modes of listening right there--listening
for absolute sound pressure levels, and listening for perceived sound
source loudness.

This quote from Helmholtz also makes me think about the ear's ability
to detect differences in signals, and think of two situations:

(1) A signal from a real-world, realistic source, changes in a
realistic way (i.e. an animal moving)

(2) A signal on speakers or headphones changes in a way that doesn't
correspond to the normal, natural variations in sound -- for example,
switching between two amplifiers with a slightly different frequency
response that in no way correlates to any change we hear in real life
(like a sound moving, or getting muffled)

Psychoacoustic experiments, threshold determinations and so on, are
done mostly with signal type (2) -- well, I'm probably jumping ahead of
myself, but skimming the book makes it seem that way. So I ask, "How
much can we generalize and extend conclusions from psychoacoustic
experiments?"

My intuition tells me that different people are different. This is
also a theme of chapter two of the book. According to Moore, people
differ widely in minimal audible thresholds, in equal loudness curves,
in temporal integration curves.. and this is just the second chapter of
the book. It seems to be shaping up as a theme.

-Mike