An explanation of why we pick up auditory differences closely spaced in time but not those spaced out over time:
The auditory system works like most of our perceptual systems, by detecting differences and similarities, rather than absolute values. What we detect, for the most part, are differences from a norm or differences within a scene itself (synchronically). The norm gets set contextually, by relevant background cues. This is more evolutionarily advantageous than detecting absolute qualities, because the range of difference we can represent is much smaller than the range of possible absolute value differences. By setting a base rate relevant to the situation and representing only sameness and difference from the base rate, one can represent differences across the whole spectrum of absolute values, without using the informational space to encode for each value separately.
For instance, we can detect light in incredibly small amounts -- only a few photons -- and also at the level of millions of photons striking the retina, but we can't come close to representing that kind of variation in absolute terms. We don't have enough hardware. What does our visual system do? Well, the retina fires at a base rate, which adjusts to the prevailing lighting condition. Below that is seen as darker, above that is seen as lighter. A great heuristic.
As it gets completely dark, you don't see black, but what is called "brain grey", because there is no absolute variation from the background norm. You see almost the same color in full lighting when covering both eyes with ping pong balls, to diffuse the light into a uniform field. With no differences detected, the field goes to brain grey.
Ask yourself why the television screen looks grey when it's not on, but black when you're watching a wide-screen movie. Black is a contrast color and true black only exists in the presence of contrast. Same for brown and olive and rust.
Same for happiness, actually. The psych/econ literature on happiness shows that most traumatic or sought after events are mere blips on the happiness meter, as we simply shift base rates in response, adjusting to the new conditions. Happiness is primarily a measure of immediate changes, bumps above base rate. So minor things, like good weather and people saying a friendly hello, are more tightly correlated with happiness than major conditions like having the job or the car you've been wanting.
Think about pitch. We can tell whether pitch is moving, but only the lucky few have any sense of absolute pitch... and this is usually a skill developed with a lot of feedback and practice. Why? Because it's more useful and economical to encode that information.
Far from cleansing the auditory taste of one note from one's mind and then playing another, you need to play them immediately back to back for comparison purposes. Perhaps you can switch the order around to eliminate after-effects.
By the way... wine-lovers *do* take blind taste tests. And experts can readily identify ingredients in wine, as well as many other objectively verifiable qualities. So it is perhaps not the best analogy for audiophiles who cannot do the same, and won't deign to try.
The auditory system works like most of our perceptual systems, by detecting differences and similarities, rather than absolute values. What we detect, for the most part, are differences from a norm or differences within a scene itself (synchronically). The norm gets set contextually, by relevant background cues. This is more evolutionarily advantageous than detecting absolute qualities, because the range of difference we can represent is much smaller than the range of possible absolute value differences. By setting a base rate relevant to the situation and representing only sameness and difference from the base rate, one can represent differences across the whole spectrum of absolute values, without using the informational space to encode for each value separately.
For instance, we can detect light in incredibly small amounts -- only a few photons -- and also at the level of millions of photons striking the retina, but we can't come close to representing that kind of variation in absolute terms. We don't have enough hardware. What does our visual system do? Well, the retina fires at a base rate, which adjusts to the prevailing lighting condition. Below that is seen as darker, above that is seen as lighter. A great heuristic.
As it gets completely dark, you don't see black, but what is called "brain grey", because there is no absolute variation from the background norm. You see almost the same color in full lighting when covering both eyes with ping pong balls, to diffuse the light into a uniform field. With no differences detected, the field goes to brain grey.
Ask yourself why the television screen looks grey when it's not on, but black when you're watching a wide-screen movie. Black is a contrast color and true black only exists in the presence of contrast. Same for brown and olive and rust.
Same for happiness, actually. The psych/econ literature on happiness shows that most traumatic or sought after events are mere blips on the happiness meter, as we simply shift base rates in response, adjusting to the new conditions. Happiness is primarily a measure of immediate changes, bumps above base rate. So minor things, like good weather and people saying a friendly hello, are more tightly correlated with happiness than major conditions like having the job or the car you've been wanting.
Think about pitch. We can tell whether pitch is moving, but only the lucky few have any sense of absolute pitch... and this is usually a skill developed with a lot of feedback and practice. Why? Because it's more useful and economical to encode that information.
Far from cleansing the auditory taste of one note from one's mind and then playing another, you need to play them immediately back to back for comparison purposes. Perhaps you can switch the order around to eliminate after-effects.
By the way... wine-lovers *do* take blind taste tests. And experts can readily identify ingredients in wine, as well as many other objectively verifiable qualities. So it is perhaps not the best analogy for audiophiles who cannot do the same, and won't deign to try.