Re: Pierre Divenyi's remark on Repp

[Steve Mcadams <Steve.McAdams@xxxxxxxx>]

Regarding the tritone paradox and Divenyi's following remark:

"  especially when the only test object is an individual (and very
subjective) response to the Shepard tones."

Why should a judgment of "the pitch went up or it went down" be any
more "subjective" than the kinds of judgments one uses in pitch
discrimination tasks where the subject has to choose between . . .
"the pitch went up or it went down"!!! The only difference is in
the stimulus (in one case some physical parameter actually went up
or down, and in the other up or down has no physical sense, being
physically ambiguous, which does NOT mean that people don't reliably
hear it as going up or down (though of course David Green and Ed Burns
and Neil Viemeister don't which makes members of the hardcore psycho-
acoustics community afraid to admit they DO!). Just because there is
a "right or wrong" answer doesn't make the response any more "objective".
At any rate, since we all seem to be interested in "perception" we are
all interested in relation between measures of "subjective" experience
and measures of "objective" stimulation.

So where's the beef, Pierre?

Respectfully submitted,
Steve McAdams