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The invention of measurements and perception

This is going to be pretty airy-fairy. Sorry.

Let’s talk about how measurements get invented, and how this limits us.

One of the great works of engineering, science, and data is finding signals in the noise. What matters? Why? How much?

My background is in computer science, and a little in electrical engineering. So the question of what to measure to make systems (audio and computer) "better" is always on my mind.

What’s often missing in measurements is "pleasure" or "satisfaction."

I believe in math. I believe in statistics, but I also understand the limitations. That is, we can measure an attribute, like "interrupts per second" or "inflamatory markers" or Total Harmonic Distortion plus noise (THD+N)

However, measuring them, and understanding outcome and desirability are VERY different. Those companies who can do this excel at creating business value. For instance, like it or not, Bose and Harman excel (in their own ways) at finding this out. What some one will pay for, vs. how low a distortion figure is measured is VERY different.

What is my point?

Specs are good, I like specs, I like measurements, and they keep makers from cheating (more or less) but there must be a link between measurements and listener preferences before we can attribute desirability, listener preference, or economic viability.

What is that link? That link is you. That link is you listening in a chair, free of ideas like price, reviews or buzz. That link is you listening for no one but yourself and buying what you want to listen to the most.

E
erik_squires
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geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Can the pain this thread is causing me be measured? 🤕
stevecham
3,340 posts
 
@kosst:" In the strictest scientific sense, there is no such thing as music, or sound, or color, or hot or cold, or pain or pleasure."

Do you even know what an enzyme is and what it does?

In the strictest scientific sense, you’re way off base. I agree that the perceptions of pain or pleasure are somewhat subjective, but sound, light, color and temperature are all quantifiable physical properties. Why do you think an ordered system like the human brain would evolve to have very complex systems to sense thermodynamically defined properties that exist in the physical universe if there was no advantageous need to do so? After all, it’s energetically expensive to develop such systems and the universe doesn’t work that way. Typically, unless there is a closed energy system, like the earth/sun, entropy prevails. That’s just the way it is.

Your sense of what consitutes science, is frankly, an utter joke, so please educate yourself on some basic physics instead of simply hand waving emotional conjecture that has no basis in anything other than your sorry navel gazing.
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