Analytical listening and short-term memory
Some background:
I have spent much of my life working by myself on technical projects. Over time more and more thoughts were in the form of pictures rather than words.
Now, after all this time, I have a have a rather harder time understanding what people are saying as they are talking. Instead, I ‘replay’ what they said, what was recorded in my short term memory, going over and over it and analyzing it [hopefully quickly! :-)] several times before I am sure what they meant, as well as getting some kind of handle on the subtle subtexts of what they said.
I presume most of us do this to some degree.
Listening closely to music:
A similar thing happens when I am listening to music – consuming both the music in real-time as well as going over it several times in short term memory.
Yes, one can miss a small snippet of music while one is doing this. But this repetitive analysis can result in moving some of what one has heard to long term memory, which can be useful if one is seriously evaluating equipment or systems and one wants to compare them later ‘offline’ as it were.
Methods:
This list is by no means exhaustive, but is instead an attempt to try and start talking about how people can analyze sound quality using their short-term memory.
1. comparative analysis. Comparing the sound: harmonics, dynamics, resolution etc. to what we have heard before – both with similar music and the exact same music
2. emotional analysis. Determining how we feel when we hear the music and, in fact, individual passages and notes in the music. Does it make us feel happy, sad, angry, involved…?
3. rightness analysis. Does it sound right? or does it sound wrong? Some of this can be as easy as determining whether guitars sound like guitars, for example. Some is more subtle, for example is one being fooled into think there is actually a real person standing there in the room playing this instrument. Finally, there is this sense of just plain ‘rightness’; something CD players did not have for a decade or two – something that is still somewhat elusive even today, but only noticeable when you actually something that is significantly more ‘right sounding than what we are used to’. [and by this we DO NOT mean accuracy or ‘realness’ – this is more about how the human mind hears things and is more related to ‘believably’].
4. separation analysis. During complex passages, did every instrument stay in place and sound like it would all by itself? Or did it blend in a mushy wall-of-sound? This is easiest if one just plays the complex passage over and over again – indeed – but a lot CAN be done by analyzing one’s short term memory recollection of the passage.
5, 6, 7… ?
Although short-term memory vanishes after about 90 seconds, at least mine does – getting more and more severe as I age – the immediate term memory of just a second or two, used for analyzing the sound of music, seems to still be working OK. Here’s hoping it continues to do so! 🙂
Hello Mike,
Rather strangely I have been wondering about music and memory in the past couple of days but from a slightly different perspective. At the same time I have been renovating an old timber house I have been running in some new audio components [SOOTTO and SOGON LX96 cabling] by having a cd on repeat in one of the rooms and logged 840 hours with Bugge Wesseltoft’s Trio cd as the background constant. I didn’t tire of it and was often drawn into a track by subtle nuances I must have heard at least 300 times before but didn’t appreciate. Eventually I changed disc when I had another set of cable to run in and the same sense of delight has occurred with 2 other cds I didn’t think much of with a first time listen, Melody Gardot’s The Absense and Nic Bartsch’s Randori. My observations are purely that with repeat exposure of a body of work over an extended timeframe as an incidental task allows a much more cohesive memory and appreciative delight in that performers effort. It adds greatly to the sense of engagment when listening for pleasure.
Regards, Bryan.
Hi Bryan,
Ah, well, this is an interesting observation… considering many of us all kind of shyly apologize for our occasional [or not so occasional :-)] ‘casual listening’ because we didn’t have time to sit down for a proper focused listening session all the time [and here you are with a conjecture that it aids concentrated listening!].
My office is off the listening room (and across the dining-room) so I hear a lot of music this way. About the building up a cohesive memory of the music – perhaps we let more of it in while in such a relaxed state of mind as opposed to when we are listening – and perhaps overwhelmed by the grandeur – in the listening room?
This requires more thought… Anyone else experience similar things?
Take care, and thanks,
-Mike