Re: Pierre Divenyi's remark on Repp (Steve Mcadams )


Subject: Re: Pierre Divenyi's remark on Repp
From:    Steve Mcadams  <Steve.McAdams(at)IRCAM.FR>
Date:    Wed, 27 Oct 1993 09:11:33 +0100

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


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