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Post by MartinT on Dec 28, 2014 19:23:24 GMT
According to an NLP understanding, there is a significant amount of "contextualising" of any experience in order to make sense of it and to make a fit between the experience and our maps. Much of this contextualising is unconscious and also involves, memory, emotions and past experiences, as well as more senses than just our auditory system. Yes! I'm doing that all the time only I have always called it thought experiments. My engineering mind just can't help it, although it never gets in the way of enjoying the music. However, I do at least try to get to what I hear in terms of changes made to the system, whether it be cables or footers or something else.
Conveying that to others is where the problems start. I certainly don't want to impose my ideas 'by the power of my personality' as happens elsewhere, and nor do we want anyone else doing it. All we can do is debate and agree or differ.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 28, 2014 19:32:26 GMT
I couldn't have said it better and I both respect and value your tolerant and inclusive stance here. It shows when viewing the forum and it's the main reason why I frequent here and not elsewhere. I do envy your engineering mind though. Anything that involves maths, physics, spatial relationships, quantities, angles and processes just plain hurts my head. I was interested in reading Pinkie's post on this earlier, especially his attempts to "silence" the overactive part of his brain so he could let the artistic side take charge. It resonated with my experience as I really feel like I have to overcome a huge obstacle in order to do anything practical.
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Post by MartinT on Dec 28, 2014 20:59:00 GMT
Sometimes I find myself simultaneously loving and falling into the music I'm listening to and admiring the technology that brings it into my listening room! Both halves energised for double the satisfaction
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Post by MikeMusic on Dec 28, 2014 21:32:23 GMT
I've played around a lot with the Tony Robbins ideas and others. My conclusion - almost anything is possible. I've tried and succeeded altering state/s many times, not always though. Very interesting and very useful when the brown stuff hit the fan and is all over the place. NLP has a lot of bad press but then so do lots of things - Hifi forums frinstance
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Post by Deleted on Dec 28, 2014 22:39:58 GMT
I like Tony's approach when he says to just use the bits that make sense to you and work for you: Just throw the rest away. A good approach to hifi too I feel. I also like some of his sayings, such as "motion creates emotion". He's an incredibly accomplished master of his craft IMHO.
More lately I've really become attuned to Wayne Dyer's teachings although I'm not sure everyone will still recognise his work as NLP given its Taoist spiritual dimension. His speaking voice is truly amazing too. You can hear the change in him from his earler material to his later stuff. The growth in the person he has become is so evident just through the tone of his voice. It also sounds great through a decent system. My favourite book of all time is his "Being In Balance". I've re-read it so many times and the hardback copy is just so beautiful to behold.
Apologies for the thread drift. I'm off to find a certain book..............
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Post by MikeMusic on Dec 29, 2014 7:58:51 GMT
I have a couple of things* by Wayne Dyer and some others I may well have absorbed - hopefully all the good bits *Books and or tapes
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Post by pinkie on Dec 29, 2014 8:32:48 GMT
I was adamant that I heard differences in mains leads when I bought expensive ones As was I when I upgraded my mains cables to cheaper ones.
Anyone can overcome expectation bias if they just be honest with themselves.
The point is you had an expectation that the leads would make a difference. That's not overcoming expectation bias. My expectation is that they don't. That gives us different maps. And we can both be happy with our results. But to overcome expectation bias, you need to be able to compare the "bargain, nugget, all my skill and experience to discover" lead with an ordinary kettle lead - without knowing which you are listening to. If you know what you are listening to, then your expectations will be part of the experience. It's only really relevant if you work in the industry, and want to be sure your latest innovation is real and not wishful thinking. As a consumer -listen and enjoy however you like. The more I look at forums, the more evident it is that a very substantial part of the pleasure is "doing something". Having the all time final solution perfect way to listen to music would be a disaster for most HiFi enthusiasts.
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Post by MartinT on Dec 29, 2014 9:06:49 GMT
In fact, at that particular time I had no expectation that the cheaper cable would be better. I didn't need to compare with a kettle lead, I had dismissed them a long time previously. What I did was try something that was sent to me on the off-chance. What I ended up doing was to sell all the very expensive cables, replacing them with less expensive ones, and make a profit in the process. Quite unexpected.
I'm also very capable of hearing differences by listening over a period of time and then returning to the originals.
As I've said earlier, I have no compunction to 'persuade' you, only to offer my current cables as worth listening to.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 29, 2014 9:26:35 GMT
As was I when I upgraded my mains cables to cheaper ones.
Anyone can overcome expectation bias if they just be honest with themselves.
The point is you had an expectation that the leads would make a difference. That's not overcoming expectation bias. My expectation is that they don't. That gives us different maps. And we can both be happy with our results. But to overcome expectation bias, you need to be able to compare the "bargain, nugget, all my skill and experience to discover" lead with an ordinary kettle lead - without knowing which you are listening to. If you know what you are listening to, then your expectations will be part of the experience. It's only really relevant if you work in the industry, and want to be sure your latest innovation is real and not wishful thinking. As a consumer -listen and enjoy however you like. The more I look at forums, the more evident it is that a very substantial part of the pleasure is "doing something". Having the all time final solution perfect way to listen to music would be a disaster for most HiFi enthusiasts.FWIW I agree with you on that one. I've had far better systems in the past that I've ripped apart for no other apparent reason than the need to be doing something.
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Post by MartinT on Dec 29, 2014 9:36:53 GMT
I've had far better systems in the past that I've ripped apart for no other apparent reason than the need to be doing something. Gasp! Oh no, I certainly do NOT do that! I feel distinct pain when my system is out of action.
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Post by MikeMusic on Dec 29, 2014 13:28:24 GMT
My 'doing something' is listening to music. 4 whole days off and I didn't tweak once, even thought planned, just listened - wonderful- and watched some TV
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jkeny
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Post by jkeny on Dec 29, 2014 20:41:35 GMT
MY first post on this forum - Clive notified of this forum & this thread. Audio perception is the area that needs to be better understood so that audio reproduction can make better & faster progress. I'm interested in a different approach to understanding this perception than is offered by NLP - the approach is called Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA). It is an active research area & is focussed on how we make sense of the vibrations hitting our ears - how we have a perception of an auditory scene somewhat like we have a perception of a visual scene via our sight. When you think about it what hits our ears at each moment in time is an amalgam of all the surrounding sounds at that moment added together & causing our eardrums to vibrate. This one-dimensional vibration is then analysed & processed into auditory objects which makes sense to us - conversations/melodies/vocal leads, etc. It is commonly known as the "cocktail pary effect" - how we follow one conversation from among many other conversations at a noisy party. A good overview of ASA is given here www.orema.dmu.ac.uk/?q=content/auditory-scene-analysisAl Bregman created this whole area of research in 1999 & describes the problem of auditory scene analysis as a problem of deconstruction of simultaneous and sequential sounds. "Although we need to build separate mental descriptions of the different sound-producing events in our environment, the pattern of acoustic energy that is received by our ears is a mixture of the effects of the different events. It appears that our auditory systems solve the problem in two ways, by the use of primitive processes of auditory grouping and by governing the listening process by schemas that incorporate our knowledge of familiar sounds. (Bregman, 1999: 641)"So what ASA is about is discovering the inherent schemes/rules we use in our auditory perception to solve this problem. Here is his work so far in a diagram: " The primitive process breaks down incoming acoustic energy into separate frequency bands. The problem then becomes one of how to group the frequencies that may be emanating from the one sound source, in order to identify each separate sound source. Bregman suggests that there are two forms of grouping. Simultaneous grouping he calls “spectral integration”, and temporal grouping he describes as a “sequential integration”.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 29, 2014 20:51:38 GMT
Thanks so much for joining and posting. Wearing my heart on my sleeve, I feel perception is long overdue exploration and discussion on the forums I've seen. All too often the debate boils over into egos and arguments and that tends to limit exploration. Thankfully this seems to be an ideal forum for discussion without fear of such issues. I've glanced through the link but I am away back to have a good read and then re-read. I'd never heard of ASA so it's allthe more interesting. Thanks again for posting.
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jkeny
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Post by jkeny on Dec 29, 2014 21:13:13 GMT
Yes, I'm with you about perception being a long overdue exploration on audio forums. As you say it can lead to contentious exchanges because it is a difficult area of investigation. I believe we are hampered in discussing this on most forums because we have reached quite a good level of audio reproduction despite not understanding this perception & also despite our current measurements bearing little relationship to our perceptions.
As I said in my intro - if we are going to make significant progress in audio reproduction, we probably need to get a better understanding of what are our inherent mechanisms by which we make sense of our auditory world & begin to apply measurements that reflect these understandings to our audio systems.
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Post by MikeMusic on Dec 29, 2014 21:29:26 GMT
Keep talking ! I'd love to find out more of what music is doing inside my head and what I'm doing with it I'll click that link tomorrow when I'm with it and hopefully have something intelligent to say Edit The beginning. Is there more that goes further in everyday language ?
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Post by MartinT on Dec 29, 2014 21:57:03 GMT
we have reached quite a good level of audio reproduction despite not understanding this perception & also despite our current measurements bearing little relationship to our perceptions Thanks for joining, jkeny. It would be great if you could introduce yourself in the Welcome area so that we know a little more about you.
I agree completely with the above, we really don't know how we perceive music despite understanding the basic mechanics of the ear. Measurements are another problem area, little of what we measure correlates well with perceived auditory quality and experience.
As Mike says, keep taking!
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jkeny
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Post by jkeny on Dec 29, 2014 22:37:23 GMT
I will write a bit about myself in the Welcome area.
I wish I was an expert in ASA so that I could give an informed overview of the field but I'm not & it is still an active area of research. One thing that struck me is the fairly recent agreement (it would appear) about one fundamental neurological mechanism by which we seem to be able to separate out & group various aspects from all the sound vibrations hitting our ears into meaningful auditory objects. In other words how we separate out & follow a particular melodic line (or musical instrument) in a music piece & focus on it from among a big orchestral piece, for instance.
We seem to use a principle called "temporal coherence". It is explained as follows:
Why that struck me as important is that it throws an emphasis on timing as a central inherent aspect of ASA & as far as I'm concerned not enough consideration is given to the aspect of timing within current measurements in audio. But the other overriding aspect of all this is that audio perception is an active guessing game that takes a certain amount of brain energy. My supposition is that if we find some audio replay system as fatiguing then it is likely that this is because some of these ASA rules/principles/schemes are being broken (most likely temporarily) & this causes us to reset our guessing & reform/renew the auditory stream. So if we look at the factors in the above diagram - if all these factors remain consistently within spec for our ASA rules, we will have a relaxed listening experience but if they stray we may well experience it as less involving, less easy to engage with, etc.
As the last box in that diagram says there's "collaboration & competition between the factors" so my simplistic thinking is that the less competition between the factors, the less guessing we have to do, the more relaxed we find a particular piece of music (I'm particularly relating this to audio reproduction & playback)
This is just my surmising of the little I know about ASA & how it might relate to our experience of music playback systems.
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jkeny
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Post by jkeny on Dec 29, 2014 22:58:37 GMT
Some other aspects to mention. Even though we haven't teased out all the ASA rules we instinctively use them in our everyday lives to make sense of the auditory world & this has developed as a result of our evolution. So we pay particular attention to onset transients & do a quick analysis as these may be the sound of an imminent threat. So in any sound the onset is of particular significance to us. Also, composures have instinctively used ASA principles. For some examples of this have a look at this paper - Pg 7 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3237025/pdf/fnhum-05-00158.pdfThe first example given is of JS Bach in which A nice example of this is played & graphically shown here:
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Post by Deleted on Dec 29, 2014 23:03:52 GMT
Utterly fascinating and it fills a big gap in ip understanding for me. I've always had issues with the "timing"'of music from most CD players compared to vinyl. Now every logical reason I could find suggested that the CD player had to be timing more accurately than a belt drive TT. My perception disagreed though. Can I also say that you've really explained this aspect very well as far as I'm concerned. It's been a pleasure hearing from you (sorry about the pun) and I really hope you stick around. Edit: I was replyng to your post before last...just in case my reply appears confusing. I'm off to ready our last post now
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Post by MartinT on Dec 30, 2014 4:30:09 GMT
Bach was an utter genius, pure and simple. That's gorgeous and illustrates your point very well. It's fascinating replaying it and focussing on a different voice entirely, so well written that it's easy to pick out (and the visual cues help).
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