Re: Audio Demos

[Yoshitaka Nakajima <nakajima@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Al & Dear Colleagues,

Al and Dan Levitin's project seems very important to
promote auditory perception research, and I agree with
Professor Austin that a distinguished researcher like
Al doesn't need a reviewer for this kind of project.
But I would like to take up this problem as a more
general one.  Please, allow me to talk about our own
project.

Our research group (Gert ten Hoopen, Takayuki Sasaki,
our students, and I) made a website where we presented
several new auditory phenomena we found or investigated
(http://www.kyushu-id.ac.jp/~ynhome/).  A few of them
are still unpublished.  We wanted to make the materials
accessible to other researchers and students, especially
to young students looking for interesting topics.  (Al
kindly gave us a lot of valuable comments for the
most recent version.)  I'm glad that I sometimes get
acquainted with researchers or students who utilize our
website as a first step to explore the rich field of
auditory illusions and auditory impossible figures.  I
guess many young students get interested in visual
perception when they are impressed by strange visual
demonstrations as those published in journals like
'Perception.'  I would like the same thing to happen
also in our field.

However, we noticed several problems when working in our
project:

1. If a phenomenon is extremely novel, it is risky to
make it public before publishing.

2. Anyway you have to ask a few colleagues to review
your materials, but this is a tremendous amount of job.
Unfortunately, this kind of private job is not
appreciated officially.

3. Your website is there basically only when you keep
your present position.

4. It is difficult to have a public discussion about
someone's website.

5. Quite often, the acoustic environment sorrounding
computers is very bad.

If possible, I would like Al to pave our way to publish
reviewed auditory demonstrations somehow.  For example,
it may be possible to persuade the editor of Perception
to allow auditory perception researchers to publish
papers whose main contents are auditory demonstrations.
This journal would be more worth its name by doing that,
and we would get more students interested in auditory
perception.  (Of course, researchers might become more
critical of each other in some cases.)

I also would like to propose our community to have a
common language to generate auditory stimulus patterns.
Auditory materials must be described very exactly in
scientific papers, so it should be possible in many
cases to translate the descriptions into a kind of
computer language to generate the stimulus patterns.
We would put a short appendix to each of our papers,
and interested readers would just scan it to listen to
the patterns.  This must be the ultimate situation all
of us would enjoy.

                          Yoshitaka Nakajima
                          Department of Acoustic Design
                          Kyushu Institute of Design