Musical Soundwaves

[Richard Brekne]

Thanks Stan. I was wondering when somebody was going to ask
or point out what you do below. I would be very curious to
know who made the suggestion. Was that person part of the
group actually doing the study, or perhaps one of the
persons asked to try and identify which sound was what.
Science marches ON !!...grin.

Cheers !

RicB

JStan40@AOL.COM wrote:
> 
> David, et al,
> 
> I've held off for a while on all this, since my input is
> at least partially (no pun intended) hearsay.  Many years
> ago my then-wife was working in an Industrial Engineering
> department at Northwestern University.  One of the
> professors there had been a graduate student assisting in
> the Fletcher-Munson studies, which are known to most of us
> for having led to the development of the Loudness Contour
> switch on our stereo sets--you know, the one we switch on
> and leave on all the time?  Well, seems this study was a
> very wide-ranging one........and one of the experiments
> run was to tape record instruments on the same pitch
> (grouping them by register, of course), then editing the
> tape to eliminate the attack and the release, leaving only
> the middle of the tone.  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!
> 
> Of course, I can't answer the question of decay,
> David..................sorry!
> 
> Stan Ryberg
> Barrington IL
> Associate
> mailto:jstan40@aol.com