Blind Listening Tests?

Detlof: Psychoacoustics is about a century old now, which is pretty long in the tooth for an infant. And it's not about music. It's about perception of sound, of which music is a complex example. (How music moves us emotionally is another field entirely, but if you can't hear it--or feel it, in the case of that pipe organ--it isn't going to move you.) Also, the complexity of musical sounds actually makes it harder to hear subtle differences, not easier. People generally score higher on blind tests using test tones. So those "limited parameters" actually give us an upper bound for what is audible using a musical source.

JD you sound like a 10 hz tone to me...you have me stand in awe, not only do you keep late night studies with the ladies, you also do the most complex experiments in other fields until, what was it, you had two of the 24 year old ladies squished? Terrible. You must be Dr. Strangelove in real life, please admit it. There is so much of that hz tone in my ears, that I am AWEfully confused. What will you do now...get new ladies and fiddle with their shortchanged abdullas? WOW... and Jostler, thanks for the enlightenment. I would say psychoachoustics is even older, it goes back to the Greeks and early China and India, but you would say, that was prescientific, which of course it was in a more narrow sense. You were right in assuming, that I meant the emotional impact of music on us, where to my knowledge science so far has no real answers yet.A question, seriously, don't want to bug you, I had put it in another thread and never got an answer: Do you have any idea for an explanation about those odd experimental data, which showed, that if you play music to people whose hearing is limitid in the upper ranges, I forgot where the cutoff point was exactly,but it must have been around 10 khz or above, and in playing it, you cut off the frequencies, which they were not able to HEAR, they all and sunder at once noticed this fact all the same practically always and could thus differentiate between music played normally and cut off in the highs, even though "psychoaccoustically" they should not have been able to hear any difference at all. Another thought, I wonder if you could not develop a mathematical model, which would "prove", that the more complex and "rich" a musical offering, the greater the chances to hear "subtle differences". Would be an interesting hypothesis to go after. JD bring out your 24 year old rats, or what was it again, the 24 girls from P.E.T.A? I am so confused, there is that tone again...........

Detlof: Dont' know about studies of the hearing-impaired. I can think of a number of plausible explanations, but I'd be speculating (as opposed to listening) blindly. For example, could they not hear those frequencies at all, or was it just at a lower level? (In other words, how steep was their low-pass filter?!) Could be they heard enough to detect something, but that's just a wild guess.

As for your mathematical model, it would run counter to experimental evidence. I know of one test of cables where listeners could distinguish between two cables using pink noise, but not using a piece of choral music. That probably won't surprise too many audiophiles.

JD; incredible post. Nice beat, easy to dance to, I'd give it a 9.9 and I voted accordingly-- heh heh heh. :>) Your post makes much more sense to me than not having enough confidence to trust in your own senses. Is it psychological? You bet. Are you funny? You bet. Is humor psychological? You bet. Can humor be measured? Only psychologically. Maybe you could re-capture some of your rats and test this. Cheers. Craig

JD........one more thought-- Maybe you could enlist the help of the "three blind mice"......put it all to music, and you could have a classic blind test of whatever you want.