Re: Audio Demos (Yoshitaka Nakajima )


Subject: Re: Audio Demos
From:    Yoshitaka Nakajima  <nakajima(at)KYUSHU-ID.AC.JP>
Date:    Mon, 18 Sep 2000 14:14:01 +0900

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 A few of them are still unpublished.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


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