Well having been listening and recording a lot of acoustic and unamplified mountain music (bluegrass mostly with some gospel mixed in) you sort of get a feel for what ‘right’ sounds like. Down to character of instruments.
Granted it’s an oddball genre of music but one that in its purest form is rarely amplified. Orchestra, acoustic bands, anything that you hear purely is what I think ‘it’ is.
Then applying this ‘trained listening’ to music reproduction certainly can’t hurt.
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There are lots of different types apparently, some people hear all sorts of sound even music or voices, people have been thought mad. Mine is the common "whistling"
😕 What I was getting at is that sound is in your head, outside it's merely air pressure changes 😉😀
Indeed, good point - if that is how auditory processing works then what is being attempted in the pointing out some of the weaknesses of the sense of hearing or the attempts at denial of its workings? I believe that the assumption is (& it's often stated by many) that once they did a blind test, their eyes were opened (so to speak) about what they could hear. So what we have is people now stating that they have replaced a delusion of what was heard previously with the 'new truth' (or is it just another delusion - a delusion that there is no difference to be heard?)
People often cite the Mcgurk effect as an example of how seeing 'fools' hearing as an example of the flaws of sighted listening. So where is the "new truth" in this? Because even when we know what is in the waveform & what we should hear, we still hear the ba or fa, depending on the mouth formation in the video. So the "new truth" hasn't liberated the sense of hearing from this slavery to the visual sense - we don't suddenly hear fa all the time no matter how the mouth formation in the video - we still hear it exactly as before. We cannot learn not to hear it in this way. Why? Because this is the way our senses work - it's hardwired in the brain.
As you can see, someone may hear his own inner ear sounds initiated by impulse sounds. Would it be a real sound? Would someone's hearing experience in such case be same as other one's? If we hear something, is it necessarily an incoming sound or might it be partly a product of our brains or a cochlear or inner ear system?
Ok, I'm getting your meaning now. I see now you are taking timing into the picture - good.
Ok, good, binaural timing i.e phase relationships can play a significant role in localizing sound but as you say, maybe it is being perceived as timbre differences due to the nature of the test signal? One of the 2019 research papers I linked to stated that a noise signal bandpass limited between 400 & 1000Hz was the most revealing of ITD localization abilities.
The real point is that everything in the waveform has to be evaluated according to auditory perception if that is the ultimate judge of audio reproduction - it really doesn't matter if an ITD shift in such a short pulse results in the perception of a timbre change rather than a shift in position - it is what is perceived & learning the rules by which auditory processing works is important for focussing on what parts of the music signal are important to get right
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Therefore should we accept the fact that the musical improvement brought by a prestigious device is not achieved through acoustic pressure?
BTW, no problem to measure the whole audio chain. Reviewers should be told, Atkinson, Rubinson, Fremer, et al. We know it. Maybe some influential audio business persons in this thread should tell the reviewers.
Right & everyone's pinnae is a different shape which means that the same waveform is changed in different ways by these different shaped pinnae & different shaped auditory canal, therefore the spectrum of the sound arriving at the tympanic membrane is different for everyone. So now we have a dilemma - does everyone hear a different version of the sound?
Well here's an interesting experiment which reveals something about perception - prism glasses were worn by volunteers - these glasses turned the view upside down. It took about a week of wearing these glasses for the brain to now interpret the signals according to the model of the visual world it had previously learned i.e everything righted itself & was no longer upside down.
Now when these glasses were removed, the volunteers immediately saw the world the upside down way but quickly adjusted to seeing it in the correct orientation.
Now the really interesting bit - even after a couple of months without exposure to the prism glasses, once these volunteers donned the prism glasses again they quickly adjusted & perceived the world in the correct orientation - it didn't take a week, just a couple of minutes. So what do we learn about perception from this?
Perception is a learned model of the physical world which interprets the signals arriving at the relevant brain structures in a way that makes sense of these signals i.e they are internally cross-referenced & evaluated across the different senses to arrive at an internal sensory object which maps to the real world physical object & allows us to predict the behaviour etc of these objects. So what's happening in the visual prism example is that it takes about a week for a new model to be built which satisfies the above correlation to real world objects. But once that model has been laid down it is retained for a longish period of time & can be reverted to when needed. Consider it like a very complicated set of algorithms & rules based heuristics which form a sensory model of the world in that particular sense.
The same experiment was done with changing people's pinnae - their localization abilities reduced significantly but a new model was internally created in about a week & their abilities were back to their level with non-modified pinnae. Again, removing the changes & they quickly were back to normal. After some months apply the same changes & they quickly had their full localization abilities again.
So are we all hearing differently or is the perceptual system such that the way it is constructed ensures we all pretty much experience the same world?
BTW, I'm not suggesting that babies build their perceptual models in a week - they take longer, I believe.
Pretty threadbare comment & logic
I always suspect "golden ears" and "training ones hearing" etc was BS contrived by the FUDmongers
You really think 'training' is BS?
Why is it a recommended in the scientific discipline of auditory research?
Again, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that we hear all that's in the waveform at once - that all is revealed to the listener moment to moment
It changes what we consciously perceive - you really need to slow down & absorb some of what's being said instead of knee-jerk responses. I've said it before but you do become the Spanish Inquisition & nobody wants the Spanish Inquisition 🙄
Are piano tuners trained or can anyone do it? Being conscious of one aspect of the sound to a degree that others would not necessarily achieve?
Just to reply in some more detail to this - auditory research has historically relied on tests in which volunteer(s) report their conscious perception of change in sound.
More recently FMRI & other non-invasive brain signal sensing has been used which opens the door for seeing what doesn't make it to conscious perception but is still registered by the brain. Obviously, no particular training is required.
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Not really, you'd probably be surprised what I've absorbed, I've heard it before and my audio memory isn't that bad 😉. But for the sake of others perhaps I should let you ramble on? 🙂
My rather pathetic point is, that while it is interesting how we make up illusions in our brains it doesn't change what we hear, it's purely academic, or rather, it will remain purely academic for reasons, that again, have already been gone into and I don't think repeating will serve any purpose, even for those who haven't heard them before. But, don't let me stop you, do continue......
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