Welder
19-08-2011, 15:36
I like a bit of measurement ;)
I have about as much faith in my hearing as I do in my eyesight and even less faith in the processing unit called the brain. Go picking mushrooms or get yer pharmaceutically supplied version and then come back and tell me you can trust your senses. The brain reacts to chemicals and the body produces different chemicals under different circumstances. They all effect your perception.
I’ve read stuff about the placebo effect and stress under listening tests and while I’ll grant they have their influence I don’t think that’s the problem here.
What seems to get overlooked here is we are often listening to subtle differences. Sure, swap out a Roberts Rambler radio with my current system and I’m pretty confident I’ll be on it. Swap something that produces a subtle change and it starts getting much more complicated.
Sit me in front of a strange audio setup and play me music I’m not necessarily familiar with and swap bits about, it wont matter if I’m valium calm and had my ears syringed out that morning, I’m unlikely to be confident about what I hear. How can I be? I don’t know what I’m listen to, or listening for :scratch:
Me and a few friends tended to descend on one of our group on a regular basis to play music and socialise. During a debate on the subject of double blind testing etc we came up with this scheme.
We decided that he should paint a half metre square section of the wall in his music room a different shade of yellow every day, or not, and we should all fill in a log stating whether we thought the colour had, or hadn’t, been changed that day. This went on for two weeks.
Given usually about six of us tended to gather there most days at some point, and we felt comfortable in the environment and on average spent a couple of hours either tweeting, parpping, banging or twanging one sort of instrument or another and listening to tunes we were hardly under stress and the “experiment” kinda blended into our normal routine.
There are many shades of black…
IbMqqtnvLTY
.erm, yello, especially if you’re a bit creative with a mixing pot.
At the end of the experiment it was quite apparent we had been guessing. Interestingly perhaps the only person who got anything like a positive result was the guys wife, largely attributed to the fact that she apparently had to clean up after the painter and prolly had plenty of time to study the colour in depth as she was the one who scrubbed the paint off the floor, kitchen sink, etc and had the advantage of a constant reminder by way of unusual nail varnish as we got reminded, often :lol:
Anyway, I digress.
It wasn’t until every colour change got painted side by side on the wall that the changes became more obvious; essentially no memory involved, instant comparison; something impossible with sound I suggest unless perhaps you play single tones through two sets of identical equipment bar the one component. Not a lot of point in that unless you listen to sine waves for pleasure. It hardly represents the complexity of music.
Hopefully most of us have a feeling for what our particular setups sound like. We acquire this feeling over time and experience. I know for example from my music server project that I couldn’t even begin to give a meaningful description of the changes I hear compared to say my laptop and if they got swapped about in an ABX style test, I wouldn’t be confident of picking one from the other. The same applies to many of the changes I’ve made to my system over the years, some I just prefer the sound of over time and if I revert to a previous configuration it just doesn’t sound right.
It’s a bit like that feeling when you open the door to your home and know that someone else is at home or a vehicle you drive a lot that isn’t performing as usual. In my experience these feelings are often right and there is a change from “normal” but you just can’t put your finger on what it is and if questioned you may well shrug that feeling off but, you’ll be under the bonnet or checking the house later.
By now the subjectivists may be joining hands and singing. But wait, I did say I didn’t trust my ears and it seems from the above the eyes aren’t too reliable either.
ABX style testing just doesn’t hack it as scientific measurement in my book. It failed miserably in our visual test and there were changes to be seen. It fails miserably for audio as well, certainly in the test conditions I’ve read about and the very basic experiments I’ve carried out with my mates.
That leaves measurement and until we can measure what we can’t atm there is only opinion and one is as good as another.
I have about as much faith in my hearing as I do in my eyesight and even less faith in the processing unit called the brain. Go picking mushrooms or get yer pharmaceutically supplied version and then come back and tell me you can trust your senses. The brain reacts to chemicals and the body produces different chemicals under different circumstances. They all effect your perception.
I’ve read stuff about the placebo effect and stress under listening tests and while I’ll grant they have their influence I don’t think that’s the problem here.
What seems to get overlooked here is we are often listening to subtle differences. Sure, swap out a Roberts Rambler radio with my current system and I’m pretty confident I’ll be on it. Swap something that produces a subtle change and it starts getting much more complicated.
Sit me in front of a strange audio setup and play me music I’m not necessarily familiar with and swap bits about, it wont matter if I’m valium calm and had my ears syringed out that morning, I’m unlikely to be confident about what I hear. How can I be? I don’t know what I’m listen to, or listening for :scratch:
Me and a few friends tended to descend on one of our group on a regular basis to play music and socialise. During a debate on the subject of double blind testing etc we came up with this scheme.
We decided that he should paint a half metre square section of the wall in his music room a different shade of yellow every day, or not, and we should all fill in a log stating whether we thought the colour had, or hadn’t, been changed that day. This went on for two weeks.
Given usually about six of us tended to gather there most days at some point, and we felt comfortable in the environment and on average spent a couple of hours either tweeting, parpping, banging or twanging one sort of instrument or another and listening to tunes we were hardly under stress and the “experiment” kinda blended into our normal routine.
There are many shades of black…
IbMqqtnvLTY
.erm, yello, especially if you’re a bit creative with a mixing pot.
At the end of the experiment it was quite apparent we had been guessing. Interestingly perhaps the only person who got anything like a positive result was the guys wife, largely attributed to the fact that she apparently had to clean up after the painter and prolly had plenty of time to study the colour in depth as she was the one who scrubbed the paint off the floor, kitchen sink, etc and had the advantage of a constant reminder by way of unusual nail varnish as we got reminded, often :lol:
Anyway, I digress.
It wasn’t until every colour change got painted side by side on the wall that the changes became more obvious; essentially no memory involved, instant comparison; something impossible with sound I suggest unless perhaps you play single tones through two sets of identical equipment bar the one component. Not a lot of point in that unless you listen to sine waves for pleasure. It hardly represents the complexity of music.
Hopefully most of us have a feeling for what our particular setups sound like. We acquire this feeling over time and experience. I know for example from my music server project that I couldn’t even begin to give a meaningful description of the changes I hear compared to say my laptop and if they got swapped about in an ABX style test, I wouldn’t be confident of picking one from the other. The same applies to many of the changes I’ve made to my system over the years, some I just prefer the sound of over time and if I revert to a previous configuration it just doesn’t sound right.
It’s a bit like that feeling when you open the door to your home and know that someone else is at home or a vehicle you drive a lot that isn’t performing as usual. In my experience these feelings are often right and there is a change from “normal” but you just can’t put your finger on what it is and if questioned you may well shrug that feeling off but, you’ll be under the bonnet or checking the house later.
By now the subjectivists may be joining hands and singing. But wait, I did say I didn’t trust my ears and it seems from the above the eyes aren’t too reliable either.
ABX style testing just doesn’t hack it as scientific measurement in my book. It failed miserably in our visual test and there were changes to be seen. It fails miserably for audio as well, certainly in the test conditions I’ve read about and the very basic experiments I’ve carried out with my mates.
That leaves measurement and until we can measure what we can’t atm there is only opinion and one is as good as another.