mike1127

You're referring to the Diana Deutch book?

Let me get clear on the argument here. Is this an argument that long-term memory for component sound (or the sound of a student's playing, or one's own playing) is nonexistent? Let's say a listener hears a selection of music at time T1 and a similar but different selection at time T2. Let's say T1 and T2 are far apart (could range from 10 minutes to days). Let's say that the listener hears other music in-between. Or we could say that the end of the selection at T1 intervenes T1 and T2 so even without additional music, there is music between. Is the argument that people have a difficult or impossible time judging pitch similarity when pitches intervene; hence a listener will have a hard time judging the similarity of selection T1 and selection T2 given that much time and many pitches have intervened?

I think I was talking about experiments on speech and the way the brain fills in missing words. I don't see the relationship to perceiving musical qualities. It's as if the "component difference" skeptics learn that hearing involves the brain as much as the ear, or that illusions are possible, and then conclude musical hearing must be unreliable.

If you want to leave it, that's okay. I just want to correct something: I'm not saying that audio scientists are wrong about the results of the experiments they've done, but I am saying this: - questioning the applicability to music. Illusions are not relevant to perceptual abilities. That's because no one said that reliable or repeatable perception is free from illusion. It's that the perception is responding to true differences of input. Not that what we construct in our brains is a perfectly accurate model of the real world. It's that when the real world changes, what we construct in our brains changes, within the boundaries that apply to the study and performance of music. Happy listening. The concert hall is best, anyway.

Just to get back to my main point before I respond to this, I think that musicians/conductors/etc remember the actual sound from day to day, from week to week, etc. in order to navigate along some sort of path toward a more preferred result (preferred in that moment, with that student, in that performance, etc.). I don't think there's any other way to do it other than remembering the sound and comparing sound in the moment to previously heard sound. Because this would seem to fly in the face of audio science as I understand it, I'm interested in what theories an audio scientist would propose to explain this or give some alternative explanation. Maybe I'm wrong and there's some new theory that would convince me more. Your reply is a bit of a straw man. I never said they play it completely differently or unexpectedly at each rehearsal. But let's say the conductor asks them to play it a certain way. That's how #1 that conductor, with #2 that orchestra, #3 for that rehearsal, wants them to play it. The conductor may even be doing an experiment and comparing different ways of playing a piece, remembering the sound of each way and choosing their favorite. But different conductors and different orchestras will play the piece differently. Surely you know this! I don't know what kind of music you are into, but if you are into classical music, you will probably own several recordings of a warhorse like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. These recordings will have quite different musical performances. Surely you know this! There's no one right way to perform a piece. A good teacher will be looking for the student to play it in a way that's authentic to that student, not a copy of someone else's playing. It's critical that the teacher be guiding the student in the process of experimenting and choose what works best, for that student, on that instrument, with that piece, at that stage in the student's development, etc. I claim the musicians do this by remembering the sound from day to day, week to week, etc. and that there's no other way to do it, although I'm interested in what an audio scientist might say about that.

That's not how music lessons work if the teacher is any good. There is no one "correct" way to play a piece. But let's say you're right. You haven't said how the teacher remembers the student's prior sound. Let's say in each lesson the teacher compares it to a standard. What mental experience is the teacher having and how to they remember it from week to week? In other words, what is the internal experience of comparing to a standard?

Let's say there's a musician who has a student. The student comes in once per week. The teacher makes comments each week based on her memory of the sound of the student in previous weeks. What kind of memory is that?

You're the one who brought up the concept of a "pattern," and I'm trying to get you to elaborate on what you mean by that. It's not clear. For instance, you've said that you could recognize your mother's voice even if distorted because of the pattern you've trained on. That sounds like a pattern is some kind of abstraction, independent of specific realizations. On the other hand, you've said Yo-yo Ma could recognize a change in his sound because it's different than what he's used to, and what he's used to is a "pattern." That sounds like a pattern is something concrete and exact.

Musicians play different pieces every day, experiment with different ways of playing every day, listen to their students play, and compare all of this to memories of prior sounds. What would pattern recognition look like under this scenario? How long do you need to listen to something exactly the same way before you've formed a pattern?

Yo-yo's sound changes every day. There's not one familiar pattern. My point is that he, like all musicians, need to have a good memory for details of their sound ... not a fixed sound, but a changing sound .. or else they wouldn't reach the levels we expect of accomplished musicians. You are suggesting he uses pattern matching to do this. But how long does he have to play exactly the same way to establish a pattern? 100 days of no variation in his playing? What if he can establish a pattern in 5 minutes?

Only a small minority of people are expert musicians. Only a small minority of people are fanatical audiophiles. Only a small minority on any subject are experts. So that doesn't have anything to do with it. And an expert at using relative pitch for dictation could nail that test too. (And about half the students at the music school I went to had perfect pitch.) Also an experiment in one context doesn't generalize to another context. An experiment on remembering pitches doesn't generalize to remembering the sound characteristics of audio equipment. So to get back to my point, we widely recognize famous musicians to have gorgeous sound. How do you think they got there? By remembering their prior attempts to make sound. If we only remember sound for four seconds, then every day they would have forgotten what they sounded like the day before. No progress would be possible.

Okay... so how does that support your argument that we can only remember timbre for 4 seconds?

The pitch experiment (recognizing the return of a pitch heard before) is an example of a test that would turn out completely differently if it were done on experts - by which I mean people with absolute pitch recognition. In a similar way, when I read descriptions of audio science, I see that a lot of these experiments were performed on laypeople.

By that definition of "pattern recognition." I'm not talking about pattern recognition. I'm talking about Yo-yo recognizing small changes in his sound (including timbre) from day to day. He may recognize a new sound that he's getting -- definitely not something "heard hundreds of times."

Maybe some of you know "jj" the sound scientist. I watched the jj video on YouTube "What does accurate even mean?" It reminded me of what he used to say on the Usenet forum dedicated to audio 24 years ago. (rec.music.audio? don't remember the forum name) He mentions that aural memory is only a few hundred milliseconds long. That's surprising to those of us who believe we can hear differences between components when auditioned minutes, hours, or days apart. I have an informal argument that aural memory can last hours or days in musicians or musical instrument designers, and probably in other experts such as audio engineers, experienced audiophiles, etc. First, we observe that musicians or musical instruments designers are honing their sound. They often have a unique, recognizable sound, and it's often of very high quality. Next we observe that it takes a long time to develop that sound. Years of daily practice and experimentation. What are they doing during that time? I suggest they are "navigating"... that is, through past experimentation, they have some concepts of sound they like, and they are trying to move closer and closer to an image of what they would like to sound like in the future. I observe that to "navigate" somewhere requires that you be able to determine where you are at this moment relative to previous locations. So, imagine that every morning, Yo-yo Ma gets up and starts practicing. Because aural memory only lasts a couple hundred milliseconds, he has no idea where he left off the night before, right? He has no image of the sound he'd like to produce today. And if he does something that sounds better today than it did yesterday, he has no idea, because of course he can't remember what he sounded like yesterday. As this is an obvious absurdity, we conclude that he does have an enduring memory of his sound and that he can make fine distinctions in sound even in practice sessions that are days apart. By the same logic, so do expert instrument makers, audio engineers, etc.