<HTML>In a message dated 08/02/2002 7:20:10 PM Central Daylight Time, owner-pianotech-digest@ptg.org writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Del and list , has anyone tried the experiment I mentioned earlier, eliminating the attack and decay and compared? I can understand the attack side effect, what about the decay side of the equation?  Any theories? David Koelzer Vintage Pianos DFW </BLOCKQUOTE> 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 subjects 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</HTML>