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Looper's Delight
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At 1:50 PM -0600 12/4/04, Mech wrote: >I don't think that *technically* this is Psychoacoustics (although >since both deal with perception and interpretation, there's >obviously going to be a bit of dovetailing). ..Psychoacoustics, as I >always understood it, deals mostly with the way the physical wiring >of our biological systems affects the way we hear things. Whereas >most of what we're speaking of above mostly deals with conditioned >responses and the way our thought processes associate different >stimuli with each other. I think we're in the twin realms of psychoacoustics and music cognition, and I'm not in a position (without a little reading and reflection) to cite a definitive definition of the precise boundary between the two. However, back in graduate school (circa 1978-79) I took a couple of classes in psychoacoustics, did a lot of reading of the current literature, and even did some listening experiments. One thing I learned was that at least in some areas of auditory perception there were distinct differences between the responses of naive listeners (undergraduate non-majors) and skilled listeners (music graduate students). I imagine different researchers may draw the line between strict physiological psychoacoustics and music cognition in different places, but I think some of the most interesting areas are where the hard-wired and the learned responses interact. Thus auditory learning has an effect on what one can hear in a piece of music one repeated listenings or even during the course of a single listening. I've observed this in my own responses even when the repeated listenings are widely separated in time (by years, even). However, there are certain psychoacoustic responses that are so deeply embedded in the neural anatomy as to be permanently entrenched (cf. the work of Diana Deutsch). -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com