arnyk wrote: > I followed up on the mention of Michael Lavorgna in that article > http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/ars-prepares-to-put-audiophile-ethernet-cables-to-the-test-in-las-vegas/ > and found this article: > > http://www.audiostream.com/content/daniel-j-levitin-your-brain-music#c4H6QTcIoDHG0ds4.97 > > I recommend the book heartily as among other things a proof text for > some of the benefits of ABX testing. So I was initially surprised to > find that an old school anti-DBT die hard like Lavorgna was also > recommending it. Watch this spin: > > "The scientific method requires that we control all possible variations > in order to be able to draw firm conclusions about the phenomenon under > study. Yet such control often creates stimuli or conditions that would > never be encountered in the real world, situations that are so far > removed from the real world as not even to be valid. The British > philosopher Alan Watts, author of The Wisdom of Insecurity, put it this > way: "If you want to study a river, you donÂ’t take out a bucketful of > water and stare at it on the shore." > > Several points: > > (1) Alan Watts was a very old-school philosopher who died in the early > 1970s so his take on life might be just a little outdated. > > (2) If you are familiar with people who study river water quality > professionally, you know that after studying the river to figure out > where to sample it, taking out a bucket of water and studying it on the > shore is exactly what you do, and it works. > > I think the point that Levitin was trying to make is that we can't skip > too lightly over the part of the analysis where we figure out the > representative places to take our samples.
Yes. I have read the book (light reading while on vacation a couple years back...). Not bad. But he is trying to marry the fields of perception, neuroscience and his own background in music performance and production. As a result the book is more on -brain perception of music-, the different genres, rhythmic effects, evolution of the human audio/music perception system. -Certainly not much on the accuracy of the reproduction technology itself, which is what we're talking about.- As for Lavorgna using the quote to say something about the blind test, he is misguided and taking that quote out of context. Want to see the quote in situ? "Can we define music by definitions? What about types of music, such as heavy metal, classical, or country? Such attempts would certainly fail as they did for “games.” We could, for example, say that heavy metal is a musical genre that has (a) distorted electric guitars; (b) heavy, loud drums; (c) three chords, or power chords; (d) sexy lead singers, usually shirtless, dripping sweat and swinging the microphone stand around the stage like it was a piece of rope; (e) ümlauts in the gröup names. But this strict list of definitions is easy to refute. Although most heavy metal songs have distorted electric guitars, so does “Beat It” by Michael Jackson—in fact, Eddie Van Halen (the heavy metal god) plays the guitar solo in that song. Even the Carpenters have a song with a distorted guitar, and no one would call them “heavy metal.” Led Zeppelin—the quintessential heavy metal band and arguably the band that spawned the genre—has several songs with no distorted guitars at all (“Bron-y-aur,” “Down by the Seaside,” “Goin’ to California,” “The Battle of Nevermore”). “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin is a heavy metal anthem, and there are no heavy, loud drums (or distorted guitars for that matter) in 90 percent of that song. Nor does “Stairway to Heaven” have only three chords. And lots of songs have three chords and power chords that are not heavy metal, including most songs by Raffi. Metallica is a heavy metal band for sure, but I’ve never heard anyone call their lead singer sexy, and although Mötley Crüe, Blue Öyster Cult, Motörhead, Spin¨al Tap, and Queensrÿche have gratuitous umlauts, many heavy metal bands do not: Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Ozzie Osbourne, Triumph, etc. Definitions of musical genres aren’t very useful; we say that something is heavy metal if it resembles heavy metal—a family resemblance. Armed with her knowledge of Wittgenstein, Rosch decided that something can be more or less a category member; rather than being all or none as Aristotle had believed, there are shades of membership, degrees of fit to a category, and subtle shadings. Is a robin a bird? Most people would answer yes. Is a chicken a bird? Is a penguin? Most people would say yes after a slight pause, but then would add that chickens and penguins are not very good examples of birds, nor typical of the category. This is reflected in everyday speech when we use linguistic hedges such as “A chicken is technically a bird,” or “Yes, a penguin is a bird, but it doesn’t fly like most other birds.” Rosch, following Wittgenstein, showed that categories do not always have clear boundaries—they have fuzzy boundaries. Questions of membership are a matter of debate and there can be differences of opinion: Is white a color? Is hip-hop really music? If the surviving members of Queen perform without Freddie Mercury, am I still seeing Queen (and is it worth $150 a ticket)? Rosch showed that people can disagree about categorizations (is a cucumber a fruit or a vegetable?), and that the same person can even disagree with himself at different times about a category (is so-and-so my friend?). Rosch’s second insight was that all of the experiments on categories that had been done before her used artificial concepts and sets of artificial stimuli that had little to do with the real world. And these controlled laboratory experiments were inadvertently constructed in ways that ended up with a bias toward the experimenters’ theories! This underscores an ongoing problem that plagues all of empirical science: the tension between rigorous experimental control and real-world situations. The trade-off is that in achieving one, there is often a compromise of the other. -The scientific method requires that we control all possible variables in order to be able to draw firm conclusions about the phenomenon under study. Yet such control often creates stimuli or conditions that would never be encountered in the real world, situations that are so far removed from the real world as not even to be valid. The British philosopher Alan Watts, author of The Wisdom of Insecurity, put it this way: If you want to study a river, you don’t take out a bucketful of water and stare at it on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow.- Rosch felt that scientists had disrupted the flow of categories by studying them in such artificial ways. This, incidentally, is the same problem with a lot of the research that has been done in the neuroscience of music for the past decade: Too many scientists study artificial melodies using artificial sounds—things that are so removed from music, it’s not clear what we’re learning." As you can see, Lavorgna is being ridiculously selective with what he wants to see and interpret. This quote is in the context of trying to define musical genres for heaven's sake! Nothing to do with defining sound quality or accuracy of reproduction as in a blind test. I agree with Levitin that taking a small sample of a passage will not allow one to fully appreciate or study the totality of a musical piece on brain functioning (which is what he talks about in the book). But I do believe a small sample of music or synthetic signal can very well allow us to quantify the accuracy of a machine. And rivers are not engineered machines the last time I checked :rolleyes:. Archimago's Musings: (archimago.blogspot.com) A 'more objective' audiophile blog. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archimago's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2207 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=103978
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