No! 20Hz----20kHz is NOT the range of human hearing!

[nat whilk II]

 

 

 

Odd you should make that point - I was just thinking about blind/double blind testing the other day, and it occurred to me that there might be a basic misrepresentation of human response and perception in the "blind" model.

 

Meaning this: there is ALWAYS interaction between "knowledge" and "experiences" in human perception. Think of the experince of being told to "look again" when you didn't see something that others saw? And with that knowledge, that reinforces your belief that something is there to see, you were then enabled somehow to see the thing that eluded you previously?

 

In other words, the attempt to create a blank slate on the "knowledge" side of human experience, which is what blind testing attempts to do, is to fundamentally distort the normal process of perception.

 

It's like the very old adage of St. Aquinas - I believe in order that I might understand, altered to "I believe in order that I might perceive".

 

Which of course is a supremely unscientific way of thinking about things.

 

Another thing comes to mind too - the idea from quantum mechanics that the conditions of any observation effect the outcome of the observation.

 

Of course, any preconception or a priori idea about a perceived thing can have the effect of creating a false impression or artificial perception. But I think it can go either way - preconceptions and a priori conditions of perception can both enable AND distort the perception. The enabling is valid - something heretofore unperceived that is truly "there" can be "revealed" under the mysterious influence of preconceptions. Just as it can be distorted by the same.

 

That's the way I see human nature. The lab rat model of "pure, unbiased" response seems to dumb down and reduce the process of human perception to something sub-human.

 

so there:)

 

nat whilk ii

[Jeff da Weasel]

I can't over 20kHz any more, although I could as a kid - the "ultrasonic" burglar alarms in some stores were physically painful.

 

Oh, I don't think I can hear over 18kHz these days, and if I do, it's just masked by the tinnitus. These are good reasons why we might want to consider having other people mix our albums as we get a little older.

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

before you can hear something above 12 kHz via speakers,

 

you need some speaker which deliver that range

[slight-return]

 

Odd you should make that point - I was just thinking about blind/double blind testing the other day, and it occurred to me that there might be a basic misrepresentation of human response and perception in the "blind" model. Meaning this: there is ALWAYS interaction between "knowledge" and "experiences" in human perception. Think of the experince of being told to "look again" when you didn't see something that others saw? And with that knowledge, that reinforces your belief that something is there to see, you were then enabled somehow to see the thing that eluded you previously? In other words, the attempt to create a blank slate on the "knowledge" side of human experience, which is what blind testing attempts to do, is to fundamentally distort the normal process of perception.

 

 

 

I think that we could be straying into the area of cognition as opposed to perception (not that there has to be a super bight line)

 

and I think, often we might be more looking to answer the question of "sensation" than perception itself

 

[bubba has a neat explanation in terms of pain...tissue damge is sensation, pain is perceptual, suffering is cognitive]

 

Of course, any preconception or a priori idea about a perceived thing can have the effect of creating a false impression or artificial perception.

 

Well, that's the thing, perception is, essentially a behavior - all perception is artificial.

 

By that same token, I don't really know that we can call it "false" as it is simply an interpretation of the sensorium.

If we include the cognitive/perceptual system as an active and valid part of the object then any artifact due to that part of the system is a valid part of the object (we can't really say "she is not seeing something that's not there" b/c we've included the seeing mechanism as part of the "there" - might be in the noodle, but if we include that as part of the deal, there it is)

 

IT's kind of classic subject-object pollution (which is, also, the idea behind the uncertainty prinicple)

interstingly that is one of the reasons where single- and double- blind tests differ

(single-blind doesn't have significant mechanism for removing the observer, whereas double blind attempts to control for that..."clever hans" is sort of THE classic behavioral psych example)

[spokenward]

oops, I posted in this thread and I forgot that I have absolutely no opinion that I feel obliged to defend....

 

there, that said, carry on for about 15 pages or so. Thanks!

[blue2blue]

Some people believe that the small hairs on your body react to frequencies higher than 20kHz, transmit the vibrations to your skin, and there's a sensation although not an audible one. Who knows? I don't. All I know is that a system that goes up to 20kHz sounds fine to me But I've been doing a lot of mastering lately, and one band sent in files some of which were recorded at 96kHz and some at 44.1kHz. I do think the 96kHz ones sounded better, but not because they reproduced higher frequencies - my assumption is that something about the 96kHz recording caused the audible frequencies to reproduce better. This wouldn't surprise me given my experience with amp sims, which sound night-and-day better when run at 96kHz than 44.1kHz. I'm not talking subtle improvement, but something even the tin-eared would perceive.

 

Yeah... somewhat different issue involving the way that modern DSP is approached and I'm afraid it's pretty well over my head. But the (undoubtedly aforementioned) Dan Lavry has addressed some of those upsampling and oversampling issues in a number of writings and covers them to some extent in his explainer on sampling theory and sample rate. ( www.lavryengineering.com/documents/Sampling_Theory.pdf )

 

He and others have also noted that lesser converters often appear to demonstrate a bigger jump in delivered quality between 44.1 and 88.2 or 96 than better converters do with the same sampe rate increase because of filtering and other issues; the clumsily put upshot is that delivering a decent quality signal is 'easier' for the lesser converters at the higher rate, even as the better converters already do a good job at the 'standard' rates of 44.1/48.

[blue2blue]

Odd you should make that point - I was just thinking about blind/double blind testing the other day, and it occurred to me that there might be a basic misrepresentation of human response and perception in the "blind" model. Meaning this: there is ALWAYS interaction between "knowledge" and "experiences" in human perception. Think of the experince of being told to "look again" when you didn't see something that others saw? And with that knowledge, that reinforces your belief that something is there to see, you were then enabled somehow to see the thing that eluded you previously? In other words, the attempt to create a blank slate on the "knowledge" side of human experience, which is what blind testing attempts to do, is to fundamentally distort the normal process of perception. It's like the very old adage of St. Aquinas - I believe in order that I might understand, altered to "I believe in order that I might perceive". Which of course is a supremely unscientific way of thinking about things. Another thing comes to mind too - the idea from quantum mechanics that the conditions of any observation effect the outcome of the observation. Of course, any preconception or a priori idea about a perceived thing can have the effect of creating a false impression or artificial perception. But I think it can go either way - preconceptions and a priori conditions of perception can both enable AND distort the perception. The enabling is valid - something heretofore unperceived that is truly "there" can be "revealed" under the mysterious influence of preconceptions. Just as it can be distorted by the same. That's the way I see human nature. The lab rat model of "pure, unbiased" response seems to dumb down and reduce the process of human perception to something sub-human. so there:) nat whilk ii

Leaving aside quantum mechanics for the moment (and something tells me that moment will, itself, prove to be eternal), the phenom you address early in your post is not a new notion. Training is an important aspect of cognitive interpretation of raw perceptual data. That's why we so often address and qualify that aspect when we're talking about perception tests we expect to extrapolate to the general population (which is why the subject pool for such a test must be a randomly selected sample from the target population of statistically viable size).

 

But the context here suggests that we need to pay particular attention to precisely what we expect to learn and why we use double blind testing in the first place. (BTW, double blind testing will remain an important approach, but, increasingly we are correlating the understanding we've derived from it with the more 'directly' arried at data from brain scan testing.)

 

Double blind testing is designed primarily to try to eliminate cognitive bias from coloring results of perceptual testing. It is, in a sense, a filter to remove spurious results. We still must properly design the rest of the experiment in all other aspects, if we want to get meaningful, significant results from our testing.

 

We need to get slight-return's significant other in here to help us hash all this stuff out. Something tells me we need a woman scientist's magical touch...

[blue2blue]

I know that you and I have experienced that here on SSS just in the past several days in a couple of threads!!

Why, I have no idea what/who you're talking about!

 

 

 

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

i must assume you all are Neurologist

 

or have at least a MA in applied listening psychology for the blind

[slight-return]

We need to get slight-return's significant other in here to help us hash all this stuff out. Something tells me we need a woman scientist's magical touch...

 

 

Um, just be aware, except for Temnov - the rest of you, collectively, are known to her as "those harmony thing geekey guys"

 

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

the thingy is very simple...

 

 

down to cicrca 16 Hz, a soundwave is perceived as tone

 

below 16 Hz it becomes a kinetic event

 

my son is 16 years old and can hear a sinus at 23'800 Hz

 

 

and this is a self-explanatory hearing plane:

 

[slight-return]

 

i must assume you all are Neurologist or have at least a MA in applied listening psychology for the blind

 

 

nah, bubba's doctorate was neuropsych (neurology wouldn't necessarilly get into the cognitive/perceptual parts, but it could the of value in the sensory parts) - she fills me in on the neuropsych stuff

 

(well, that and some of the pals - since we were dating during her grad school years I seem to wind up hanging with neuroscientists and lawyers)

 

 

for me, QA and stats analysis - that's why I tend to comment on experiment design

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

most neuropsychological studies regarding hearing are done in the hearing aid industry

[slight-return]

 

most neuropsychological studies regarding hearing are done in the hearing aid industry

 

 

Really? - how'd you crunch those stats?

 

I'd probably just go to the journals (Nature Neuroscience and such) or to NIH / academic attached stuff for the pure research

[blue2blue]

I am all neurologist none of the time. But I do try to get around in my reading. And I'm always open to updating my knowledge. Also, I always keep in mind that you say your son can hear a 23.8 kHz sine tone. When his upper frequency perception gets up over 25 kHz, please let me know and I'll update my mental boilerplate on the generally accepted limits on human frequency perception in free air.

 

[nat whilk II]

Leaving aside quantum mechanics for the moment (and something tells me that moment will, itself, prove to be eternal), the phenom you address early in your post is not a new notion. Training is an important aspect of cognitive interpretation of raw perceptual data. That's why we so often address and qualify that aspect when we're talking about perception tests we expect to extrapolate to the general population (which is why the subject pool for such a test must be a randomly selected sample from the target population of statistically viable size). But the context here suggests that we need to pay particular attention to precisely what we expect to learn and why we use double blind testing in the first place. (BTW, double blind testing will remain an important approach, but, increasingly we are correlating the understanding we've derived from it with the more 'directly' arried at data from brain scan testing.) Double blind testing is designed primarily to try to eliminate cognitive bias from coloring results of perceptual testing. It is, in a sense, a filter to remove spurious results. We still must properly design the rest of the experiment in all other aspects, if we want to get meaningful, significant results from our testing. We need to get slight-return's significant other in here to help us hash all this stuff out. Something tells me we need a woman scientist's magical touch...

 

I'm going to go find my statistics text from grad school. Catch up with you guys later...

 

nat whilk ii

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

 

Really? - how'd you crunch those stats? I'd probably just go to the journals (Nature Neuroscience and such) or to NIH / academic attached stuff for the pure research

 

 

 

I read the applied research reports, for example at the university Oldenburg, as well the applied research and the descriptive research reports from hearing instrument manufacturers

[slight-return]

 

I read the applied research reports, for example at the university Oldenburg, as well the applied research and the descriptive research reports from hearing instrument manufacturers

 

 

I don't think that'd accurately indicate most (we'd need a broader and more neutrally selected sample across the whole of neuropsych research to determine most)

 

 

sample selection problems and all (I think b2b pointed to that sort of error a little earlier)

 

 

esp as you are reading applied research reports - I mean they're applied !!

 

 

anecdotals are interesting interesting beasties with teethies -- gotsta handle them carefully and keep them in a proper environment

[tedmich]

your hearing range is completely unique

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

just like everyone else.

[Beck]

The real questions in my mind are 1) why does this topic keep coming up over and over again, and 2) why do some people want so badly to believe there's more to hearing than the established known science? It's like the X-Files.

 

The current established known science can only be known by questioning the old established known science. The future established known science is yet to be known.

 

~Beck

[blue2blue]

 

your hearing range is completely unique just like everyone else.

And it doesn't just stop with frequency perception -- that uniqueness extends to every aspect of the human auditory system -- and it extends through time as well: what you hear today is not exactly what you will hear tomorrow, even if you could somehow be subjected to exactly the same sound phenomenon in exactly the same room with your head and body in exactly the same position.

 

In practical reality, every minute turn of the head, change of position, as well as conditions within your body and particularly the interconnected system of the ears, nose, throat, oral cavities, change your perception in ways both small and large.

 

Listen to a given sound, yawn or swallow, and listen again. Your raw perception of the sound will have changed. Our brains go a long way to sort of 'averaging out' those perceptions over time but, if you concentrate, you can to some degree 'override' that mental correction and, by carefully paying attention, get a practical demonstration of how tiny changes in both body, environment, and the body's position/orientation in that environment mean that, in essence, you never step in the 'same river' of auditory or other perceptual experience. Every moment is, in ways tiny and not, unique.

[slight-return]

 

And it doesn't just stop with frequency perception -- that uniqueness extends to every aspect of the human auditory system

 

 

 

not to mention my mom told me I'm special and unique - like a pretty pretty snowflake

 

I know she's right too, b/c they put me in "special detention" sometimes

[blue2blue]

 

The current established known science can only be known by questioning the old established known science. The future established known science is yet to be known. ~Beck

 

Naturally, but at any given time, a strict adherence to the Scientific Method gives us the best-tested, most reliable answer currently available.

 

It makes good sense to think that over time, scientific knowledge will be refined and extended.

 

What does not make sense is to reject current accepted science simply because one would like to believe something else that has not stood up to proper scientific investigation and verification.

[blue2blue]

not to mention my mom told me I'm special and unique - like a pretty pretty snowflake I know she's right too, b/c they put me in "special detention" sometimes

Special is as special does. Or is done to, I guess.

 

 

But I'm still trying to get over the fact that your scientist wife has lumped me along with the rest of these geeky harmony thing guys.

 

Clearly, there are limits to what science can tell us at any given time.

[slight-return]

 

Clearly, there are limits to what science can tell us at any given time.

 

 

There are certainly limits to what a scientist can tell me at any given time

 

What she wants for her birthday

If I spend 3 hours making a dish she's never had before - will she eat it

the flight number and ETA of her plane

Where she put my wallet when she borrows it

 

[FWIW she lumps me in with the harmony things]