Musical Expectation Bias

How Great This Is

Very cool including when he wryly looks back over his shoulder at us at certain spiffy moments. Spacetime church music.

Thanks i never heard this one ...

😊

This is getting into "This is Your Brain on Music" territory. A very well written book, but I lost the enthusiasm (the point) about halfway through.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but personally, I'm happy that I have an open mind, and I am not pigeon-holed into one or two genres. 

Again, maybe this is off-topic, but one of our favorite albums is the Buena Vista Social Club. We don't speak any Spanish. Conversely, we had a house guest that clearly did not like the record because she could not understand the words.  

Expectation bias generally relates to experimental design flaws, not (in this example) to subjects’ perceptions in a study. If expectation bias were involved in that study, it would likely be a fundamental issue rendering the investigators’ discussion misleading, as they’d be premised on spurious results.

This is an example of why it can be hard to discuss such topics in audiophilia - there’s a “minimum height requirement” in background knowledge for stuff like this to make sense among back-n-forth discussion (i.e. > 1 person). 😉 I know that looks reeediculously pretentious in print (Eew!) - I’m sorry, and I mean no offense. It just is what it is.

Expectation bias

I tend to look at the brain as a "component" with the same issues concerning "wiring," "voltage," "interference" etc. Just because the brain is neurologically wired and runs "wetware" instead of software doesn't mean it is exempt from the same type of calculus we apply to "electronics." As is evident in the MIT study, the brain has its own set of built-in biases which naturally accrue in systems that have been constrained and guided by evolutionary pressures over millions of years. Practically speaking I thought the article's most salient implication was that we as human animals should always be aware of the biases that can accumulate inside our heads as we are conditioned by advertising expectations, peer pressure expectations, mantra conditioning, tribal conditioning and all the other exogenous "pressures" that become endogenous. Seasoned audiophiles already understand this and are constantly cross-examining their motives and second guessing their decisions. Something that became noticeable and sort of unexpected to me as I started out on this journey was how much impact factors like time of day, mood, fatigue and musical preferences can alter what we think of as "right" stereo system decisions and assessments. That these assessments can maddeningly vary from one hour to the next, one day to the next, and one week to the next doesn't mean that we should castigate ourselves for being fickle. We are fickle - even when we think we are being strictly logical and unbiased - and we need to get over it.