Quantifying What You Hear...

[RicB]

Hi Stéphane

By and large I tend to agree with your post. You say it all in the 
words...  "quantify a quality" !.  Really a hopeless prospect.  I had 
someone a couple years back try and tell me there was such a thing as  
"objectively arrived at preferences" in defense of .... well... a 
preference.  These kinds of mixing of the objective and the subjective 
are from the get go nearly impossible and are responsible for very very 
much bad science.  Just a couple days ago at a dinner party here someone 
got all off on a heated horse about fluor in touthpaste.... want a 
rant..  I wont get into it... but its right up this kind of alley in the 
end.

All this said... I stand by what I said in my first post.  Some of the 
concepts / descriptives we use for piano sound could indeed be 
quantified enough to be meaningful. But whether the amount of these and 
the degree to which meaningfulness will exist is worth the effort of the 
scientific resources required/implied by Matt.... I am not sure.  He and 
Stephen will no doubt discuss the matter quite a bit before going 
further in anycase since it a Masters degree project.  Stephen is no 
dummy... in fact he stands on solid science quite a bit more stubbornly 
then many IMHO. 

It IS any interesting thought to be sure.  And information along these 
lines would be of value no doubt about it.

Cheers
RicB


    Hello Matt.

    You are after the holy graal of the piano technician/designer.
    Just a thought : if you must quantify a quality, maybe the best way to
    approach is doing statistics among a large group of attendees.
    Now, go and quantify "personnality" ... while for the individual who
    thinks
    "this piano has personnality", he can be very sure of that, for himself.
    So, in my opinion, scientific analyse could be the wrong tool for the
    purpose.  I personnaly would lend towards analogic thinking and
    personnal
    experience to build up a certain "truth" which would enlight only
    me, as in
    this whole matter, it is about a certain analogy between the outer
    world
    (the piano) and the inner world (my soul), which raises, or doesn't
    raise, a
    certain kind of resonance (the aesthetical jubilation).
    Most probably, the rest is about measuring proportions, amplitudes
    and decay
    times of combined sinusoidal acoustic waves.
    Anyway, the research is great.

    Happy new year to you and all.

    Stéphane Collin.