The Scientific Evidence | Brain Perception Auditory Sense → Essay on Sensory Music Interpretation...

[NorthSky]

What are the tools to measure the intensity level that some music exercises on us (emotionally and spiritually)?

Neurologists study the "sounds" influence on the human race. We live in a different world that 2,000 years ago when planes and cars and factories didn't exist. The loudest noises were from the T-Rex and heavy winds blowing across the mountains and valleys of the dinos.

Back then we didn't have concrete rooms in our basement and blocked from all external noises and sounds and natural life's distortions.

Today, planes, trains and automobiles are full of distortion sounds. Plus heavy machinery from factories.
How crazy those distorted sounds of today are driving the human race?
We build bunkers (home theater rooms with treatments) to isolate and protect ourselves from outside threats (sound distortion). We watch movies in our bunkers and listen to music, and without being conscious of the world around us. No because we are 'excaping' it, away of all the distorted noises.

Only when we walk in jungles and in forests far away of the modern 'syphilisation' that we are surrounded by the natural sounds of wildlife and water cascading down from the mountains into the rivers. ...The winds above hitting the tree's leaves and making them singing like flies in a sanctuary of wild flowers.

How do we measure the emotional difference between stress and ecstasy when listening to music scores from movies (Blu-rays, DVDs, ...) and music hi-fi stereo (LPs, tapes, CDs, hi-res audio files) @ home, on the go, @ the theater, @ the concert hall, at any venues where films and music are playing?
What machines calculate with exactitude the numbers, the percentage of the right emotional level in each and in every person from the 7.35 billion living right now on this globe?

Living in a street of a really busy city, downtown Mexico, or living in the jungle atop a tree, Amazon, ...;
what tools are used to measure what music's influence has on our emotional strings/chords inside of us?

2,ooo years ago there were no planes, no trains, no cars, no factories, no chainsaws, no caterpillars, no lawnmowers, no tractors, no motorboats, no motorcycles, no unnatural noises...so music must have been more purer for the soul then? No contaminated noise from the AC power lines, no interference from audio signal transfers, no distortion from second and third harmonics, no EQ compensation.

Is today a reflection of all the noises we are contaminated and slaved to live with, and brought us up to this audio hobby we are so found of to the depth of our music soul? What influences the noises in 2016 surrounding all of us have on our emotional ecosystem? Can it be measure? If yes how and what kind of measuring tools are they using? If not why sweat the stuff that we cannot 'excape' from but only persevere in isolating ourselves inside our own soundproof bunkers?

I don't think about any of it; I'm just asking a very simple question. Just checking out if someone reading this has an answer, a theory, any idea, a proof that we're lost in a sea of beautiful sounds and distorted by the surrounding elements of unnatural noises of high distortion from a 2016's world evolution of fabricated man-made machines.

2,ooo years ago we didn't have treated concert halls, we had natural rock's environment and trees reflecting echoes thru the mountain's walls. ...Calm water of lakes to carry audio signal transfers, like from the babies cries or rocks falling down the precipices.

Then came the wheel, and the fire, and the ape, and man came up too, with woman, and dogs and cats... Man made a bow, then arrows, then when there was no mammoth to hunt down he started to play his bow like a violin...
How pure was the tone of his bow back then when there was no cars, no planes, no gas powered tools, no AC power, no trains, no outside noises? ...Just pure natural wind and birds singing. ...Rain too sometimes.

That guy playing his bow back then, while his wife, his children, his friends were listening to his compositions; how emotionally was he transferring the message of music to his listeners, and how each listener was emotionally transported? ...Did they measure the level and frequency response of the emotional soul of humans back then from that bow's compositions?
Or did they simply say; just the heck with it and let's find those mammoths.

 

[Blumlein 88]

First things first. Raquel Welch was a beautiful women there with the Trex in that movie, but humans never coexisted with Trex.

The large game were hunted to extinction with spears and atlatls. Bows were invented when there was no more large game because it gave the accuracy increase needed for smaller game.

Beyond that I don't know the answers to your queries. I know why I like kayaking down rivers. I get to places remote enough for a little while there is only the natural world. Very pleasant for every sense. Of course it might seem quite different were I in need of hunting down supper instead of building a small fire for the hotdogs we brought along. The hot dogs are a back up. We cook the fish we catch if we have luck.

I guess back in hunter gatherer days a man might kill a Jaguar and wear the pelt as a status symbol. Now he works a job and buys the 4 wheeled equivalent.

You can't put Pandora back in the box. So I guess I have only useless commentary to contribute. Hopefully someone will tell us about fMRI scans and stuff.

On thing though is you are mostly citing a time when people created the music and heard it live. Reproducing music created at another time and place is different with different requirements. Building the systems to do reproduction are not an emotional exercise though the motivation of doing so in the first place might be emotional.

 

[NorthSky]

Raquel is very welcome into this essay. This is the general audio discussion; and all points are good when it comes to audio and music and emotional intensity.
This is a no-googling zone; it's the human spirit facing the music playing. It's us speaking from our own mind.

Yeah, the bow was simply an example, and the mammoth too.

Here in simple words: We are makers of musical emotions from the world we live in. And the level of those emotions cannot be measured.

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

And the level of those emotions cannot be measured.

True enough. That is why we will get totally lost and back into subjective audiophile nonsense if we get wrapped up in them. Best to stick with characteristics of sound we can objectify in some rational way. Emotion is a powerful thing, and music speaks to our emotions and evokes them. Sound is necessary for that to happen. We can measure sound and we can objectify listener perceptions of sound. Going further than that into emotional responses to music is a can of worms, with no consistency, even in the same listener to the same music when played again.

 

[NorthSky]

Very agree with that; listener's sound (audio) preference from one medium to another, one component to another, one tweak to another, one speaker to another, one room for all...can all be correlated with measurement's analysis. ...It takes a bunch of listeners to average the between correlated measured and preference listening results.

Emotions are not a scientific evaluation. ...Only the pleasing or more pleasing perception of sounds.

 

[Blumlein 88]

The largest emotional responses I have had with music have been live music or the crappier of systems I have heard. Does not mean there is no emotion with higher fidelity nor that it in some way impairs emotion. It means other factors at least in our larger emotional responses far outweigh just the sound in reproduced music.

I worked a night shift job for a few years. I had an old Hallicrafters "portable" tube shortwave radio. I pulled it out and listened to SW broadcasts in the control room where I worked each night. At one time there was an immense variety of broadcasts. Some of those could be very emotional music listening experiences. You can't get too much lower fi than that. A higher fi rendition would not have hampered the experience though I am not sure it would have improved it all that much.

Do I remember Peter Baxandall saying once, "if you have flat response to 2 khz and less than 5% distortion you don't need more for music". My SW experience suggests even that might be more than enough.

 

[John Kenny]

Yes, this hobby & the goal of audio reproduction is the creation of an illusion - an illusion that gives us enough audible cues to satisfy our ever-vigilant auditory processing. Much like we watch television, videos or movies - they offer us enough believability to allow us to forget their limitations & become engaged with the content - this is where the emotional connection then begins. If there isn't enough believability we are constantly aware of the medium & it's portrayal - when we are bored by the sound, it's a sure indication that this believability is missing.

So, I see mentioned Brain Perception/Auditory Scene in the title which I presume means a discussion of how the auditory system works is welcome?

Let's forget about the psychophysical aspect of the ear mechanism & focus on Auditory Scene Analysis or ASA. This is the area of study, first started by Bregman in 1990 or so, which is concerned with how we make sense of the vibrations of the eardrums & create an auditory scene from these signals. Much like we create a visual scene from the impact of photons on the rods & cone cells in the eyes, we create an auditory scene from the two streams of electrical signals coming from both ears. Now, when you think about it, this is a highly complex & interesting problem that the brain has to try to solve - continuously create a fully realistic, moving auditory scene that maps to all the objects in that scene. In other words close your eyes & listen - you will hear & be able to locate all the sonic objects around you, including the size of the room, etc. just from the electrical waves being generated in the ears. Think about it - this is the equivalent of sitting at a corner of a swimming pool & being able to use only the waves hitting this corner to sense how many people are in the pool, where they are & where they're moving to, what they're doing, how big the pool is, etc.

The idea of ASA seems to have its genesis in trying to answer the question that the "Cocktail Party Effect" gives rise to - how do we follow one conversation among all the other conversations & noise at a party. All these sources of audio signals are hitting the ear at the same time as the audio signal from the conversation so how do we isolate & associate the signals that belong to just the followed conversation from among all the rest i.e how do we form an auditory object & follow it in the face of changing signals & changing surrounding auditory signals?

How the brain does this is being teased out in ASA & other areas of sound research. Now this processing happens whether we are listening to the real world or to the signals from our speakers which are attempting to create an illusion of an audio performance or audio event

We perceptually ascertain audio objects in what we hear by the brain processing that we perform on the signal. The perception of these audio objects occurs because we seem to cross correlate particular signal markers which we associate with that particular audio object - spatial location, timbre, temporal coherence, & amplitude all seem to play a role - let's call these our perceptual rules for identifying this object. So, if these rules are adhered to in the audio playback system then we have a believable illusion - the more the rules are diverged from, the less believable the illusion. Now, one thing about digital audio - because it is based on mathematics & is infinitely adjustable, it has so many new ways to diverge from these rules & introduce new audio anomalies that we have never heard in the real world - things like ringing spring to mind. When we encounter a new audio anomaly that we haven't met before we tend to be subconsciously confused as we have no model to fit it to & we are not consciously aware oh what is wrong, just that we want to turn off the playback or are bored by the sound & our attention drifts

As I've written on ASA so many times before, I'll just gather together my text from other sites if people are interested in me continuing this?

 

[John Kenny]

BTW, should this thread not be in the Psychoacoustics section?

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

I do not think it rises to that level.

 

[John Kenny]

I do not think it rises to that level.

Right!

 

[NorthSky]

General audio discussions is a high enough level. It comprises everything; general.