I don’t understand the question either. I read the question as being about memory. I’m not sure about ‘we’ [sic], but I can remember fragments and patterns sometimes spaced out over months, or even years. In music this area is sometimes referred to as ‘style’. Listening to a slow movement of a middle symphony of Haydn, I can hear patterns from other Haydn symphonies, and sometimes Mozart symphonies. In post-modernist terms, with words, this is called intertextuality.
In my classes my example is a two-minute recording in a noisy restaurant which I play to the class once. I have taken five 2-3 second excerpts. I play these five excerpts twice. I replay the restaurant scene. Less than half of the class pick up 1 or 2, most of the rest pick up 3 or 4, there are usually a handful who pick out all five.
Regarding ocean waves. I used to record hours of ocean waves. Years later, I could often identify where I did the recording by listening to less than 10 seconds. There was once a student in a class who appeared to have a kind of eidetic hearing. Many weeks after being at a concert of new [electroacoustic] music, the student was able to describe in great detail pieces he had heard once. This is an unusual skill, but is not unknown among musicians, such as George Enescu who played both the piano part, and then the violin part of the Ravel Violin Sonata, without the music, after one hearing.
Regards
Kevin
I’m struggling to understand how one could talk about the maximum temporal window independently of discussion of the dimensions of ‘interrelatedness’. Your example of a sequence of different pitches (though you don’t mention timbre/harmonic content, or envelope structure) presumes differences in the frequency domain, but similarity in other respects, is that right? So your findings might, for argument’s sake, vary according to the degree of interrelatedness (or at least, the degree of ‘similarity’ along several dimensions). Similarly, if similarity were very high (i.e. identical – a loop) – the maximum temporal window might actually be the maximum possible under any circumstances, speculatively. In that context (‘looping’), my students, in an exercise to synthesise 10 minute spatial soundscapes (in ambisonics) often try to get away with looping some ambient background material of, say 2 mins. After repeated listening of the whole piece, by the third time, the loops are very noticeable, to me (and much to the students’ surprise). But that’s because particular features are identical, the listener is accustomed to hearing loops (even expecting them) and probably various other factors. Whether this sheds any light on interrelated-but-not-identical, I’ve no idea. But it’s not very compatible with the ‘tape recorder’ metaphor, and is more akin to an example of Cocktail Party Effect. Regards ppl Dr. Peter Lennox Senior Lecturer in Perception College of Arts University of Derby, UK t: 01332 593155 I would like to ask you a couple of questions and I will be very grateful if you could help me. It would be great to be pointed out to specific publications, thank you so much in advance for that. The first question is on the maximum temporal window for the recognition of patterns in long-term audio events. Generally speaking, what is the largest (temporal) distance between audio events so that we can still process such events as interrelated? As an example, let's assume to have a sequence of different pitches equally spaced in time; what is the largest possible distance between them to still be able to perceive a melody? The second question is on the perception of redundancy in relatively complex (i.e., dynamical equilibrium) long-term audio events. As an example, think of the sound of the sea: its internal structure is never the same although it keeps a strong identity from a global point of view. I believe that this is highly dependent on both the cultural background of the listener as well as the degree of complexity of the audio event itself, but is there any study which tries to relate the perception of redundancy (i.e., the moment in which the listener's attention drops) with a specific temporal window? And is there a connection or similarity between this window and the one described in my first question? Thank you and best wishes.
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