Interesting article [with a stupid title designed to appeal to Digg readers – and it worked, because that is how I found it ;-/]:

The science of snobbery

It talks about rating [essentially AB testing] fine wine, classical musicians, and Greek art. It points out that we also all have another what we would call, based on the previous posts, a mental processor that judges the sound, in our case, based on External Factors unrelated to the sound:

External Factors Processor

Price, appearance and brand quality influence some of our decision making when it comes to evaluating quality.

I also want to add that this is in addition to contextual temporal things like the ambiance and comparative level of inebriation in which we experience the playback.

[A few notes about the article.

The judges of the classical music competition did exactly the right thing. As revealed in Chia-Jung Tsay’s experiment, all sorts of people judged the quality of the playing by the top 3 contestants to be essentially equivalent – a tie. But the contestant who LOOKED like they were the best won. I ask: how else would you break a tie, if you were a judge, but to take visual flair and style of the musician into account, when the actual playing was insufficient to differentiate the contestants from each other?

Another point is that not all people are so susceptible to intuitively derived impressions of quality. If, as in the article

“In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above. “

Then, it may be good for you to know, as you read this series of extremely weird posts, that many people [including Neli and I] are more primarily ‘System 2’ people [which based on our background in math, engineering and the sciences makes some amount of sense]. So when we reach opinions it is almost always after deliberate boring-ass multitudinous comparisons and geologic time-periods of fractious debate. Doesn’t mean we are right, necessarily [even though we are :-)], and it does mean I am probably, no definitely, more boring that people who make snap judgments about things then move on, but it does mean we aren’t at all easily taken in by marketing BS and personality blitzes and ‘expert’ opinions.

But, taken in by high [or low, you know who you are] price tags? Nah. Deliberative and attention to fact-based reality. You bet.

But what subsumes all of this is that we all can [and want to be! :-)] taken in by good music [which is what this blog is all about].

Music can [forcibly. the more forcibly the better] strip away all this long-winded deliberation and logic and shallow marketing-driven prejudices and counter-insurgency-like anti-marketing prejudices and reboot us in the deeper, System 3 part of the mind. The Be Here Now reality with the Pluto fly-by imaginative. To be really truly awake in a way that is just… that is just so fine and hard to achieve in any other way.

So AB tests are almost always useless for determining absolute quality [yes, for System 1-type people and also for the rest of us because the time- and ambiance-constraints are so fearsome and tend to dominate the decision-space] but they can be fun and can be good for providing the fuel to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life in this tired dried up news weary world we all got stuck in.

[continued from part I …]

I think there may be other Mental Processors that we have to use if we want to get more out of our music and life. Higher-level processors. This is where we all have to make a choice, the choice of whether to take the red pill or the blue pill.

The blue pill will allow you to maintain believing in the dominant illusion. That an audiophile just needs a perfect system; perfect speakers, amplification, cabling and source gear and room; the perfect source media, perfect recording gear and mircophone and an excellent recording engineer; and you will have a completely accurate reproduction of the studio or live event.

This laudable goal is the bettering of having any band or musician play right in front of you with push button convenience. Better than live with no audience issues to distract one from their enjoying the music.

But perfection is in reality impossible to achieve and the closer you get to it, the more expensive it will be. And, when you get down to basics, this approach is all a kind of scientific curiosity of a sideshow if your goal is to enjoy your time listening to music, enrich your life and increase your well being. And, perhaps, just maybe, to experience some of the deeper meaning of life. If this, then, is your goal, then perhaps it should be pursued in a more direct manner.

And so we have the red pill. Herein we examine the process where one tries to experience the ecstasy of music directly; not through how well the reproduction succeeds and how well it measures, but how well it achieves its goal of making us enjoy the music and hopefully, sometimes, experience the Beauty of It All.

Our Pattern Detection Processor

This processor finds patterns [patterns are just relationships between one thing, like a note or a steadily increasing volume for example, and another thing or things, like other notes or the chirp of a whippoorwill or Spring, for example], often wonderfully complex and intricate patterns, fractal patterns, chaotic patterns, patterns of patterns, the lack of patterns, and the interplay between patterns, often simple and elegant patterns, in Music, in the dynamics, harmonics, transitions, timings, melodies, and more.

Some people are most sensitive to, say, geographic/location patterns and they are all about the depth of the soundstage, or its width, or about the size of the imaging. Others are more sensitive to timing issues, and prefer good rhythm. Others, like me, are most sensitive to spacetime, and like good separation in time and space between the notes.

But pattern detection [and pattern matching to some extent] is one of the things our brain does very well. Mostly renowned for its capabilities in the visual processors of the brain, it seems to work just as well on sonic input as it does on visual input.

Our Pattern Matching Processor

This Mental Processor of ours finds relationships between various patterns. How a simple patterns might mimic the broad nature of various intricate patterns. How the swell and decay of a note on a piano is similar to the blossoming of a rose. How a loooong note played by Roy Buchanan on his guitar resembles the sudden overpowering emotion that occurs when your significant other smiles at you [as, say, played on “the messiah will come again”].

The number of possible relations is a very large number and is effectively without limit.

Our Emotional Contexualizer

We actually frame all our experiences in these emotional contexts. Think of it like nostalgia. Can you play “Born to be Wild” without flashing back to the emotions you have while hearing it the several thousand times you have heard it before? When you hear emotion in a voice, to understand that emotion you have to empathize with it, or even to have experienced it yourself.

There is a lot more to be said about this. For a long time I have been wondering whether this may be the supercomputer part of our brain, which can see and process information more holistically and in very large chunks. But moving on…

Our Beauty / Wonder / Spiritual Processor

This Processor sees beauty and wonder in the way patterns match and offset and highlight other patterns that we see in reality and in our mental models of the universes we live in.

Not sure how the Spiritual comes into this except that it is, when you go down this path, easy to be overwhelmed with all the beauty and the wonder of it all… and your brain just sort of short circuits and kind of gives up and goes…

Whoa.

[I know. Some of you are thinking “Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill?”. But the rest of you are hopefully thinking… “hey. That red pill ain’t so bad”. In fact, it is not only a lot more real, it is not only a lot more mentally healthy and spiritually rewarding, it is also just plain more fun].

The red pill is more real in that it gets right to the core of the reason we are listening to music in the first place.

[use the ears, luke]

As audiophiles it is right and just that we pay homage to accuracy. But only to a certain extent. Only to the extent that gear in its pursuit of accuracy, like doctors, ‘does no harm’. That the system does as little harm to the signal as possible, given our very real technological and budgetary limitations, but, AS IMPORTANT, is to do as little harm to the listening experience as possible and to the, yes, the most awesome component ever: the Listener.

This was just a strawman model of how we process music. The model is only as good as the extent to which we can use it to optimize the listening experience. It may or may not correspond to anything in real reality. But neither does most people’s conception of electricity as a flow of electrons. But that doesn’t mean that those people can’t design electrical components and it doesn’t mean we can design mental ones.

Next: now that the listener is recognized as the most important component in the system, how do we optimize it in order to increase enjoyment and the number of awesome experiences.

The most awesomest, bestest component EVERRRR … is the one most of us can find on top of our spinal column.

I was at a local Blockbuster, which is going out of business… again. And they were playing “I Want My MTV” by the Dire Straits. The POS(r) speakers built into some kind of TV were behind a pile of something or another, and it was hard to hear just what the words were.

Our Believability Helper Processor

So what did I do? I sang the words [no. no. NO. NOT out load. Silently. In my head :-)] filling in the blanks. We also sing the *music* in our heads, filling in those blanks. The blanks where the bass should be. Where the harmonic color of the guitar should be. The corrected decays for all the notes.

It came to me then that this happens a awful lot when we hear only snippets of music, or when we hear not-so-perfectly rendered music from, say, a stereo system.

This component, this Believability Helper Processor feature of this awesome component most of us have, does this ‘filling in’ for all systems at all sorts of levels. Systems with all sorts of intrinsic and relative qualities – the great and the not so great. Even on the best systems we might fill in the music with a little more lushness, add a little more slam to the bass., add a little more emotion to the voice, a little more color to the brass section.

Our Whiteout Processor

Sometimes the music has offensive sounding things in it. We like it enough to continue to listen to it, but some parts we would just rather not hear. For example, a cover of, say, a Beatles song might put in some distortion at some places in the music that just seems gratuitous and stupid. Our Whiteout Processor helps us ignore this part of the song, and as long as we do not focus too much on it… it just isn’t part of the song for us [or is at least significantly minimized].

Of course, more common examples abound: anytime the treble is bright, or the bass linger too long, or the singer sings off key [and not on purpose, which seems to be fashionable at times]. I often have to tune out somebody whacking the side of a drum as is so popular on some hip-hop, and symbols. Symbols in general as the clash clash clash I find sometimes drowns out the melody and the musicians who are actually, you know, playing the song.

Our Rainbow Processor

Sometimes we get ambitious and our Rainbow Processor helps makes things sound better than they ever could have possibly sounded. We add a ton more slam to the drum solo at the beginning of “I Want My MTV”. There are no windows left unbroken in the listening room. Perhaps we add a little more lewdness to “money for nuthin and chicks for free”. We add harmonics with more color than Timothy Leary saw when looking at a Dr. Who scarf.

I think those are the most common Processors we bring to the party when we process music and information in general.

A lot of learning how to really listen has to do with learning how to turn these internal Processors off – and just HEAR what is really happening. [A lot of learning how not to be a Sheeple also has to do with turning these puppies off when we, say, listen to the news].

And a lot of learning to explore the music-human interface has to do with learning how to manipulate these Processors for our own benefit.

For example, a glass of wine [or three. Or if you prefer, a toke or three] modifies these Processors of ours [or makes us want to or be finally willing to modify them ourselves] and you can just see the knobs being turned up a little bit on all 3 of these Mental Processors as the Tipsy Listener listens.

But what about when you want to go beyond this kind of passive mental manipulation of what you hear. What if you want to enjoy music itself as a drug [without chemical or medicinal assistance]?

[continued in part II]