Re: Perception as memory

[Eliot Handelman <eliot@xxxxxxxxx>]

Richard M. Warren wrote:
> Kevin Austin has started this thread with his 8/23 posting describing 
> how it is possible to teach many of his listeners to hear out the note 
> “D” in a 10-item chord by presenting the note in isolation as well as 
> a component in the intact chord.  He interpreted his observations as 
> representing both a refinement of memory and an improvement of 
> perceptual ability.  He asked whether listeners would be able to do 
> this with other sounds.
Prof. Warren and others,

I understood Kevin to be asking something different. In ear-training, 
one problem is to teach students to hear the
individual tones of a chord so that they can write these down.  
Essentially, the students must learn perceptual decomposition of
a complex sound into its components. If you learn to perceptually 
isolate one tone of a chord through priming, as in Kevin's class 
experiment,  can this generalize to a perception of tones in a chord 
WITHOUT priming?


-- eliot