Auditory memory

[Geoffkait]

Geoffkait said:
Your judgment regarding the sound quality of any audio system is formed by the best system you ever heard. That’s what your “ideal sound” is, the best system you ever heard. People sometimes spend a lifetime chasing the dragon of that sound.

to which Blaspheme responded,
Spending an afternoon with those Focal Grande Utopias was a mistake then.

>>>>>Better get some good running shoes.

 

[Wes]

I doubt that the clocks in Pink Floyd's "time" are engraved in my memory, but some features from that are...


I was going to use a recurrent neural network to help me remember but a Python ate it.

 

[mononoaware]

Regarding human memory in general I can say in confidence:
Human memory is terribly unreliable.

But to keep things jovial human beings have a hidden agreement to "pretend" each individuals memory is sufficient and reliable.

This post was written with brain activity, partly using the process of accessing human memory.

 

[Geoffkait]

Keith Richards remembers the words and music to Satisfaction. Almost every time.

 

[audio2design]

One of the odd (and mostly overlooked) conclusions of the Rees paper with a meta-analysis of hires testing was that longer times for music listening resulted in more positive results than short times. They didn't conclude the longer the better nor how long was optimum. But that multiple tests seemed to indicate you received more results of difference with 30 second snippets vs anything shorter.

I'm not sure I believe that would hold up to scrutiny. I would say even with the constraints of echoic memory, 30 seconds is a good test length for each selection. If differences are big enough you'll hear them. And it is more like how we listen to music for enjoyment.

There are a number of very minor differences I can detect blind with instant switching and 3-5 second long listening segments, but most of them I can detect no other way nor are they large enough to matter whatsoever to me in regards to my normal music listening. Any one have any thoughts on that?

That you are listening for 30 seconds does not prove that the actual decision process on the difference (or lack of) does not occur in the first few seconds after the change. This would be more indicative of what type of memory was used of most effective in the difference detection?

 

[Blumlein 88]

That you are listening for 30 seconds does not prove that the actual decision process on the difference (or lack of) does not occur in the first few seconds after the change. This would be more indicative of what type of memory was used of most effective in the difference detection?

It does however mean you are comparing a short term memory to an immediate sensory experience. Now one possible hypothesis would be short term memory is a data compressed versions of the real experience. Sort of an MP3. By listening for 30 seconds to let the experience go to short term memory, and then comparing that to a few seconds of the immediate experience it may be that reduced sample rate sounds less different to the memory than if you are hearing high sample rate material. All of that is a guess and would bear testing.

I'm not convinced by the meta-analysis. One thing I noticed is nearly all the positive results involved sample rate conversion. At least two of those we know used less than high quality SRC. The paper also accepts Oohashi's various test results even though some of them have been replicated with no positive results.

 

[Wes]

Toss those out and repeat the stats.