Musical Soundwaves

[Tom Servinsky]

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JStan40@AOL.COM wrote:
>
> David, et al,
>  At this point they called in
> their usual subjects and asked them to identify
> instruments.  Since they had already postulated that it
> wouldn't be possible, they were very pleased to find that
> the subject! s had great difficulty in identifying them by
> sound.  According to this person who was working on this
> study, someone finally suggested that they might try to
> find out if the subjects really KNEW what an oboe sounded
> like in the first place!  Oops.............so they
> gathered together a group of musicians, and found that the
> correlation was so high as to render the experiment
> essentially useless to their purposes!  As I say, hearsay,
> but an interesting idea.  Of course, it DOES speak to the
> idea of designing your experiment around your preconceived
> result, which would seem to be dangerous in any scientific
> inquiry!
>
First...great antidotal story!!!
Lets take this a step further an apply it directly to what's being
commonplace marketing in the configuration of a modern keyboard instrument.
The manufactures of modern keyboards  supply an array of sampled sounds on
most of their keyboards: oboe, harpsichord, sax, trumpet, and etc., with the
hopes that most buyers will accept the sampled sounds as completely factual.
What's interesting is during a sales pitch (to the novice buyer) the
salesman will demonstrate the versatility of the brand x keyboard, first
playing a bosa nova with sampled x sound ,then another , then another,
leading the customer on how realistic the oboe sound is, or the sax, or the
Bosendorfer concert grand setting (#?*&%). And for the most part, the
customer is lead on to agree these are an authentic replicas of those
instruments. Yet many have never really heard a harpsichord yet a
Bosendorfer concert grand piano. The reality, as we all know, is there is a
vast difference the authentic sounds of an oboe, clarinet, sax, trumpet,
etc.  And even a more vast difference between the sampled sounds and the
actual sound.  Point being, there is a majority of people out there who
still don't the difference between many acoustical instruments.  And drum
roll please.....it all stems back to the lack of interest from all of us to
give 100% to our local schools to promote a better, qualitative music base
to our children.
Tom Servinsky,RPT
> Of course, I can't answer the question of decay,
> David..................sorry!
>
> Stan Ryberg
> Barrington IL
> Associate
> mailto:jstan40@aol.com