Subject: Re: Musical vs everyday listening From: Peter Lennox <P.Lennox@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:46:22 +0000 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>I'd love to get to Utah, but the chances university going along with that are laughably remote. I've experimented with sending audio engineering students on soundwalks. Most come back reporting that they never realised ust how much they ignore. They also realise within about 30 minutes how incomplete are the theories of hearing that they have so far encountered. this kind of "pointless" (i.e. non-urgent) environment listening seems (to me) much more like musical listening, and it always amazes the students what fineness of detail can be picked up (e.g. height of ceilings, room asymmetry, degree of enclosedness, parallel walls, etc). I've been nibbling away (for 20 years!) at the concept of "music-as-environment", using ambisonics, WFS, etc. The idea of a piece of spatial music that one can be inside, and can navigate and explore, fascinates me - it seems somewhat distinct from the notion of music in an environment, although the boundary is naturally blurred, i think. certainly, looping seems to be a powerful tool when it comes to invoking conscious perception of musicality, which is where we came in with this discussion. I'm interested in finding minimal stimuli, and it seems that very long loops embedded in a complex soundscape take a deal longer to seem 'musical'. One thing that has come up from this discussion is that it seems likely that once some perception of musicality has been evoked, it would take a good deal to suppress it. have to think more about that. regards ppl Dr. Peter Lennox S.P.A.R.G. Signal Processing Applications Research Group University of Derby http://sparg.derby.ac.uk Int. tel: 1775 >>> Brian Gygi <bgygi@xxxxxxxx> 10/01/2007 00:15 >>> Peter - On the record, I generally try to stay away from hypotheses about mechanisms and try to stick to functional descriptions (off the record is a different story). In any case, this distinction between "musical" and "everyday" listening was first formally proposed, as far as I know, by Bill Gaver in What Do We Hear in the World (1993). His argument was based almost wholly on intuition. Since then, various researchers (such as myself) has been trying to provide empirical evidence for this. If you are at the spring ASA in Utah (plug time) Valeriy Shafiro and I are co-chairing a special session on topics in environmental sound research and that is one of the issues we hope to tackle. Best Brian Peter Lennox wrote: > what you and Brian are implying here is that 'musical listening' is > substantively different from the kind of listening that has evolved in > the face of normal environmental conditions where survival issues > naturally take precedence. This places musical listening in a context of > "exaptation" > where 'normal' mechanisms have been 'hijacked' for some other use, > outside of the usual evolutionery pressures - this is Stephen Pinker's > position, i think. However, I feel it can't be so black-and-white - > environments aren't always so urgent (and in any case, being a stranger > in morocco should awaken one's survival instincts sufficiently to > suppress any luxurious non-survival-oriented perceptual styles. I would > accept that musical listening might be somewhat analogous to using > vision to appreciate a 'nice view' where imme3diate threat is clearly > absent - but the analogy can't be pushed too far; our recreational use > of vision seems somehow less abstract - it's more usually of 'things' > (even if colour is exaggerated) whereas music is the 'thing' in itself - > with exceptions in both cases, of course. > regards > ppl > Dr. Peter Lennox > S.P.A.R.G. > Signal Processing Applications Research Group > University of Derby > http://sparg.derby.ac.uk > Int. tel: 1775 > ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________