What it says is ’we still don’t know how this ear/brain thing works’.
And someone wants to say that ’blind testing is king?’
That’s it’s all charlatans and palcebo, our imaginations?
that we have to submit to the just the electrical measurements being the arbiter of all things heard?
Are you kidding me?
To point, we still don’t know exactly how we hear, or how well we hear, and that there are variations in hearing quality and capcities that equal the range of intelligence between individuals. Meaning ... the range can be as high as 1 million to 1 (as compared to the human IQ range, re cognitive capacity but especially cognitive SPEED, or rate, over time....)
You can test the below thing on yourself easily.
One pair of cheap foam earplugs. ride the bus or drive your car downtown and then get out at the mall or a big station, etc, and then in the middle of that space (union square, times square, etc)...remove the earplugs.
You will feel your hearing sort out the noise from signal. you will feel it cut out the subsonics of your heartbeat, and the rush of blood in your veins, and so on. It will remove the thrum of air conditioning, buses driving by, subways, and other subsonics. You will feel it tune out that noise and tune in to just the sounds that are relevant to you.
What happened is that your hearing shut down and relaxed it’s processing and filters, as you walked around with the ear plugs in (10-20 minutes). Your hearing mechanism will assume the correct filtering scenarios over the course of 1.5- to 3 seconds, after you pull the earplugs out. You will literally be able to catch it, for some of you, the first time...consciously.
Note that this is automatic, subconscious animal level stuff that is out of your explicit control. But that does not mean that you cannot concentrate and filter. You are sporting the most complex and capable computer known to humanity, and you tend to use it. all day. every day. moving muscles, operating your lungs, eyeballs, and so on. and, thank the gods, you can learn. some much much faster or slower than others and in different ways. so our individual hearing vs the next person is not even close to being the same in level of quality OR type/nature.
Essentially, if you can’t hear it or if I can’t hear it, that does not automatically mean that the next person can’t. Remember. as varied in capacities in the brain tied to their individual hearing as there is variation in intelligence.
Most importantly, if you can’t hear all these things audiophiles speak about, you DEFINITELY don’t get to design or demand any tests or regimen. It should be obvious as to the why of it.
If it is still not obvious... then the idea of you being excluded from enforcing or deciding or demanding test regimen and type is REALLY way off the end off the limbs and out in the weeds of foolishness and incapacity.
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Researchers move one step closer to understanding how the brain processes multiple conversations at once
Conducting a discussion in a noisy place can be challenging when other conversations and background noises interfere with our ability to focus attention on our conversation partner. How the brain deals with the abundance of sounds in our environments, and prioritizes among them, has been a topic of debate among cognitive neuroscientists for many decades.
Often referred to as the "Cocktail Party Problem," its central question focuses on whether we can absorb information from a few speakers in parallel, or whether we are limited to understanding speech from only one speaker at a time.
One reason this question is difficult to answer is that attention is an internal state not directly accessible to researchers. By measuring the brain activity of listeners as they attempt to focus attention on a single speaker and ignore a task-irrelevant one, we can gain insight into the internal operations of attention and how these competing speech stimuli are represented and processed by the brain.
In a study recently published in the journal eLife, researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University set out to explore whether words and phrases are identified linguistically or just represented in the brain as "acoustic noise," with no further linguistic processing applied.
"Answering this question helps us better understand the capacity and limitations of the human speech-processing system. It also gives insight into how attention helps us deal with the multitude of stimuli in our environments—helping to focus primarily on the task-at-hand, while also monitoring what is happening around us," says Dr. Elana Zion Golumbic, of Bar-Ilan University’s Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who led the study.
Zion Golumbic and team measured brain activity of human listeners as they listened to two speech stimuli, each presented to a different ear. Participants were instructed to focus their attention on the content of one speaker, and to ignore the other.
The researchers found evidence that the so-called unattended speech, generated from background conversations and noise, is processed at both acoustic and linguistic levels, with responses observed in auditory and language-related areas of the brain.
Additionally, they found that the brain response to the attended speaker in language-related brain regions was stronger when it "competed" with other speech (in comparison to non-speech competition). This suggests that the two speech-inputs compete for the same processing resources, which may underlie the increased listening effort required for staying focused when many people talk at once.
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So... you want people to be forced to deal with blind testing and science has just shown that they have no idea what the F* we are testing for (FOR DECADES!!), and that they have no access to the primary mechanism and it can’t be measured except via people listening and reporting back.
Oh yeah...the big central thing in science that the measurement people have real problems with.
Observation. In science, OBSERVATION IS KING. It starts with ’I observe’, and goes from there.
I observe. I hear something. (Or hear an absence of).
So, you’ve got a component to the test that you can’t put a number on, and you can’t get rid of it by saying that if ’it can’t be measured, it can’t be real.’
To try to force that on the complex equation would literally equate with a form of insolent self forced retardation of the most blinkered kind...and to make everyone else conform to those demands.. a blinkering of the self or an incapacity to reach the complexity of the question at hand.
where one would invalidate themselves from being involved in the question, at all. Simply by opening one’s mouth and making blind testing demands and to be saying that numbers are all that counts.
What insanity.... and that’s audio science review and audioholics, in a nutshell.
Bent and distorted with inherent limitations which are grossly visible to all who can see...
And for the love of god, please grow up enough to keep it to yourselves. Thank you.