An interesting demonstration

Watched the video. First thing that came to mind: with recording industry professionals like that, is it any wonder why so many recordings sound the way they do? And the choice of music for the “examples”? Good Lord! He lost me early on with the claim that when we listen for the bass (or treble, or whatever…) that is the only thing that we will hear or be able to judge. Speak for yourself, dude!

Some of what he says about the power of suggestion can be true. So what? In no way does that mean that what astute and discerning listeners hear cannot be real nor repeatable.

Great post by a master musician mr.frogman...Thanks...



He lost me also after 5 minutes... 😁😊





I will listen to it completely though....Thanks the op for the video...

The second speaker in the beginning use some good psychological science : if you concentrate on bass you will not perceive high in the same way that if you concentrate on highs ...True, but no musician and no lover of music concentrate on limited set of frequencies at the expanse of others, we listen music timbre microdynamic playing notes ...We dont do psychological experiment in our audio room listening music...

Instead of concentrating on some specific limited bandwith like a microphone in a sound test , why not listening the specific timbre microdynamic playing?

I use that timbre perception to create my acoustic room setting...Am i deluded? Some here will say yes probably, erasing the fact that we cannot explain human hearing ability by only placebo, uneducated biases, and wrong brain working....

For sure suggestion is powerfully true in his effect on ANYBODY mind ... So what?

A maestro or an acoustician or a lover of music could also be deluded on DETAILS but could also overpower them by TRAINING in concentrating on the WHOLE not on details....

Alternatives exist between 2 details at different levels, but there is one way to judge a trumpet timbre playing a note, this a single phenomenon at one level...There exist a "relative" musical consensus about that....

Timbre is a WHOLENESS unexplained by addition of frequencies on a screen or by someone listening wrongfully alternate details ...Fourier transform dont explain timbre...Timbre is not a spectrum....Save for uneducated people...

An acoustician could use timbre with his ears to set a room in relation to a specific speakers set, is it a deluded dude when he claim that he could do it IN SPITE of the way the brain and/or the room could play tricks?

Audiophiles attentive to UNRELATED details like bass spectrum or high spectrum at different volumes are not a maestro listening the WHOLE orchestra and picking some defect in a single trumpet player.... Is the maestro deluded by some placebo or effect of his brain wrong working? Is a measuring device the only way to touch sound and musical reality ?



And  ANYWAY hearing something which is not there acoustically is precisely the definition of what music is...Read this sentence 2 times i will not repeat it....

If you want to know why this is so, buy a psycho-acoustic science book....

The truth is audiophiles, subjctivist or objectivist one, are completely conditioned by marketing of the audio ENGINEERING field "frequencies" analysis vocabulary...Music lover and musician dont buy the hype and dont mind placebo or biases listening a musical chord...They judge their audio system by listening the only supremum meter in psycho-acoustic : human voice timbre recognition speech and singing ...Singular or choral....


«Each timbre playing microdynamic tonality is an integrated cosmos, like a human figure, perceived by the listener or the musician, not a bunch of frequencies or details which can be separated or assembled by a machine or an untrained or unfocused brain»-Anonymus Musician

Not really sure she's "proves" anything except the cognitive link between our senses. If you now know what the hidden words are and play it again without reading them, do you hear them.  I don't. Merely them being suggested is not enough to hear them, reading them at the same time is. It's rather like singing to a record where you think you know the words what you sing is not what's on the record, but that is what you hear. 

dadork, great explanation. 

phjcollie, as you note in the posts below yours you can see why the industry works the way it does. People are under the illusion that they know what is going on. As a mental exercise try adding 16 +24 at the same time adding 48+32. Those are easy additions and some of us can do it in rapid succession but none of us can do it at the exact same time. Listening is no different. Listen to a choir, pick out one voice then pick out another voice. Try and listen to them together at the exact same time. Your mind can bounce back and forth quickly between the two but you can not listen to both at the same time unless you ignore the individuality of the voices listening to the choir as one voice like you would listen to McCoy Tyner playing the piano. If you want to listen to one note you have to switch to Monk. You can only listen to or, the better term is "study" one detail at a time. With the infinite number of details in any recording the likelihood of anyone listening to a recording exactly the same way, paying attention to the exact same details in succession is non existent. Every time you listen to a recording you hear it the same but listen/study it differently. This creates the illusion that you are hearing new things when you are only studying different ones. This is not my opinion but a well proven fact.

Listen to a choir, pick out one voice then pick out another voice. Try and listen to them together at the exact same time. Your mind can bounce back and forth quickly between the two but you can not listen to both at the same time unless you ignore the individuality of the voices listening to the choir as one voice like you would listen to McCoy Tyner playing the piano. If you want to listen to one note you have to switch to Monk. You can only listen to or, the better term is "study" one detail at a time.

Like i already said,"😁😊 hearing something which is not there acoustically is precisely the definition of what music is..."

I added that this is explained by psycho-acoustic science not physical acoustic...


Then you are not EVEN wrong in your misconception of what hearing music is...

I will explain to you in few words....

When someone listen to any music his conscious experience thinking,feeling,will, is conditioned ALSO with ALL  his subconscious present and past  experience...

Then his "integral being/brain " pick all there is to pick but not only  consciously and his consciousness is ALWAYS a relatively guided and trained perception...You know that a feeling is also a sensation participating in the perception and not reducible to conscious perception?

You know what trained perception means no?


In music listening the "creative imagination" at work is not ALWAYS and ONLY "illusion" and "placebo" but participate to the creation in the body/brain of the musical experience and perception conscious and subconscious...

In a famous experience the great neurologist Libet proved that our brain/body decided to act BEFORE our conscious decision, milli seconds and even seconds BEFORE our conscious decision...( it is called the readiness potential)... I will not explain why this does not negate " free will" here save for superficial materialists or scientism...My point here is to illustrate the active participation of the subconscious integrating ALL the past history of the listener through one perception which is ALWAYS a trained perception...Call them a set of educated biases...And calling these biases only merely  illusions is complete ignrance and the reason why you are NOT EVEN WRONG...You throw the baby with the polluted waters thats all you do....

Then all your posts reflect not something wrong, it is more than being wrong, it is HALF TRUTH, like famously said the physicist Feynman... YOU ARE NOT EVEN WRONG...

Then you are very far to understand even only the problem itself which is a PROBLEM in psycho-acoustic science related to the way the brain/body recreate the Tonal timbre with a "missing fundamental....I will not explain why.... Do your homework ....

In a word THE TIMBRE IS NOT THE SPECTRUM and physical acoustic is half part of the problem to solve and psycho-acoustic the other part...

i can reference all that i just wrote....

This creates the illusion that you are hearing new things when you are only studying different ones. This is not my opinion but a well proven fact.

Then deconstructing Toscanini experience like the gesture of a trained dog dont tell all the story of human perception save for people unable to distinguish audio and music, and think that electronic engineering EXPLAIN ALL...And assimilating  Toscanini  to a gullible audio consumer is not science either...

You are not even wrong my friend!

You cannot state a problem without and before being able to state with  the problem  his different aspects and terms correctly...

We cannot mimic knowledge with short ready made answer coming from blind test in psycho-acoustic like on a circus theater ruled by Objectivist debunker of Subjectivist gullible customers...

I read nothing of the sort in psycho-acoustic books ....

A simple example for children:

A rainbow perception is NOT an "illusion".....It is way more complex than that.... All my observations can be state with only this remark...A tonal timbre microdynamic perception of an orchestra is like a rainbow...

I hope you will think out of your scientism agenda....James Randy claims are not science... Guess why?

@mijostyn 

 My smiles are related to the items being sold as the comedy of the icebreaker he used to open his part of the presentation. It is the few bad apples that make cynics and skeptics of us all.  I see some good points made regarding changes made in the inaudible range, as well as the claim that a person was hearing a phase shift in a 10 foot guitar chord. There are some valid points being made in Winers presentation, but I disagree with some of the generalities regarding how people listen and what we remember or hear.  He also has a very nice listening room and some quality equipment and instruments. He does a fair job of busting some myths and outlining how Flether Munson Curves can be involved in what we hear or like.  Lastly, I have seen the trick he posted regarding the speaker companies who use averaged third octave for the graph as well as enlaging the gradients on the Y axis.  I take everything with a grain of salt or two but it would be obtuse to disregard everything in his presentation. Unless of course we are in the business of selling those Brilliant Pebbles ;)  Cheers.