Current Measurement Concepts vs. Perception

[StarryNight]

This of course opens the black hole of a debate of whether guitars can be ends in themselves. Do they exist only for the end result of making music, or can they be artful creations in themselves? Personally, I highly advocate the value of music strictly as a hobby or just for family and friends sort of thing - much folk music was that way for years - and that is the bulk of the market for our products, not for real living musicians. A person doesn't need to justify a love for playing guitar by trying to get gigs - they can play simply to unburden themselves with the normal pains of existence. So, the ultimate end in that scenario isn't the creation of the art, but the instrument being a personal tool. The music is still the ultimate end, but it is about the person spending time interacting with the instrument for its own sake.

I hear ya on spoiling players though.... I don't know how many times I've had a client's guitar in my hands listening to their complaints and just wanted to say "just learn to play the friggin' thing and your problems will go away"... but I behave.

I agree that the "audience" sometimes is just the player himself, and there is value to that. I just think music is a shared experience when it falls under the category of art. I shouldn't be so critical of people just wanting to tweak their guitars as a hobby in and of itself - kind of like some people like putting large engines in small cars etc. The thing that frustrates me is how technology + money has made it easier for people to express (or fool) themselves to the point where they feel they don't have to do any work in order to play an instrument. People come to me with so much information that they assume to know how to use the difference they have read about in an artistic way when they are still learning the basics of what it is to play music. Then there is the brainwashing that goes on in the industry to make people believe they can achieve artistic greatness by spending money.

It's a double edged sword. Technology has made it possible to refine repeatability and precision and bringing better quality instruments to more people, but marketing the products has created an obsessive/compuslive shopping phenomenon that is down right ugly! I'm sure we've all been there, it's highly addictive.

[MWJB]

"It's a double edged sword. Technology has made it possible to refine repeatability and precision and bringing better quality instruments to more people, but marketing the products has created an obsessive/compuslive shopping phenomenon that is down right ugly! I'm sure we've all been there, it's highly addictive."

It's not new, read the marketing blurb from any amp manufacturer from back in the day, how else were Fender aiming to sell their new improved technology every 6-12 months?

People don't feel that they need to do any work to be better driver either, just buy a car with better gadgets & more cubes...it's human nature, nothing specific to musicians & not remotely related to talent.

[salvarsan]

...but marketing the products has created an obsessive/compulsive shopping phenomenon that is down right ugly! I'm sure we've all been there, it's highly addictive.

Marketroids understood that they could sell more by exaggerating everyones' self-interest into narcissism. America got there first and has carried it to its current extreme.

It is a matter of crafting the sales pitch to the audiences' desires.

"Buy this guitar and you will become a rock star, receive fame and mass adulation, unsolicited sexual opportunities and entertaining drugs. Your dick will get bigger, too."

Somehow, Mojo should be invoked but I've forgot how that works.

[hasserl]

I often liken it to the stock car driver who is told "everything checks out" but he finds a shimmy at around 110mph. After arguing to the point where something IS found that is so minuscule it shouldn't matter, the mechanic goes "yeah but you can't go 110 on the street anyway, you'll get a tick

Which I liken to the mechanic who, faced with the situation described above, crawls under the car with a wrench in hand, bangs on the frame for a bit, crawls back out and tells the driver to give it a try, the guy takes it for a spin and comes back smiling saying how much better it is now. Happens all the time.

Peoples perception is their reality.

[copperheadroads]

Upgrade your gear or not ,But some days its sounds great & some days not so great
mood+mojo+goodsalespitch=NGD $$$$$$$

[LtKojak]

Which I liken to the mechanic who, faced with the situation described above, crawls under the car with a wrench in hand, bangs on the frame for a bit, crawls back out and tells the driver to give it a try, the guy takes it for a spin and comes back smiling saying how much better it is now. Happens all the time.

Peoples perception is their reality.

It's called "placebo effect".

[MWJB]

Perception is perception, reality is reality ...on occasions the two dovetail, on others they don't. No one is infallible, but by the same token, not everyone is an easily brainwashed fool.

If placebo worked that well, no one would get ill & die....they would only need to be told that they were healthy & will live forever for it to be so. Mechanics could lie & cars wouldn't malfunction....perception is a lovely, reassuring thing, when it's backed up by reality...

[frankfalbo]

There are plenty of placebo solutions in audio:

Q: "Can I have a little more of me in the monitor?"
A: "Sure (reaching down, touch knob) How's that?"

I'm talking about how when the engineer keeps telling the player (or proverbial race car driver) "there's nothing wrong" or "its the same as the other one" because the scopes tell them so. Until after enough tests, with high enough sensitivity, or with the right amount of other gear in the chain, sure enough they find something. They still might say "yeah but that can't possibly matter" but at high speeds/high volumes or for an experienced artist/listener these things can matter. Its not just the negative, like "my tone isn't quite right" its also the positive, creating just the right kind of inspiration, or tickling the ears in just the right way to add a little more happy to the day.

[hasserl]

Perception is perception, reality is reality ...on occasions the two dovetail, on others they don't. No one is infallible, but by the same token, not everyone is an easily brainwashed fool.

If placebo worked that well, no one would get ill & die....they would only need to be told that they were healthy & will live forever for it to be so. Mechanics could lie & cars wouldn't malfunction....perception is a lovely, reassuring thing, when it's backed up by reality...

As RG Keen has explained it many times on this board, you can't help but be influenced by your perceptions, even when you don't want to be. It is not possible to avoid, and that is why, whether the subject is medicine, or wine tasting or tone tasting, proper testing requires at the minumum blind testing, double blind being even better. You want to believe you are capable of not being influenced, the truth is you are not. Go ahead and refute that if it makes you feel better, but the truth remains.

[Mark Hammer]

Imagine you're in the shower. The noise from the shower head imposes a noise level that undermines effective identification of most sounds lower than a given SPL. The phone rings. If you are expecting an important call (e.g., about a job or contract), there is a higher likelihood you will "hear" the phone ringing, but also a higher risk you will hear it ringing when it isn't.

Under conditions of minimum discriminability, and greater ambiguity, the likelihood of false alarms goes up, particularly if there is motivation to detect them. That motivation neededn't be particularly strong. It could be as simple as me saying that I'll give you a nickel for every time you successfully detect something, and dock you 3 cents for every time you mistakenly detect it and it didn't actually happen. You'll recalibrate your detection sensitivity to whatever the circumstances suggest is optimal.

That is not a "placebo" (which has a formal meaning and ought not to be applied in this instance), but what psychophysicists call a "receiver operating characteristic". It's not aberrant, or stupidity of any kind, but simply how perception works when events are not as plain as the nose on one's face. Could be pickups, could be thinking that the bus 3 blocks off looks like your number, could be thinking there was a saffron "note" way in the back of that pilaf.

I made a point in an earlier post that when you reach the point of diminishing returns and have high investment, ambiguities do tend to be resolved in favour of detection, rather than non-detection. If a given technology/process is approaching assymptote, any differences are going to be VERY hard to reliably detect (i.e., high ambiguity). If the listener/user invests a lot, whether that be money in cables or pickups, or simply hours and sweat devoted to something, they turn into the person in the shower who swears they heard the phone ring.

Again, I cannot emphasize enough that this does NOT make them a rube of ay kind. But it does mean that if we want to learn something of use from our observations and subjective measurements, we need to be mindful of naturally-occurring methodological contaminants, such that what we THINK we're learning is actually something that deserves to be learned, and not merely a distraction.

[Mike Sulzer]

Imagine you're in the shower....

Very interesting post, Mark. I would like to point out one possible difference between the guy in the shower listening for his phone and the guy nearing the end of the development phase. In the first case, the listener has a known model to work with since he knows the sound of his phone really well. In the second case, the listener is looking for a change. He does not know exactly how its will sound, and might have a strong bias to consider it an improvement. I think that the probability of false detection is higher in the second case.

[kg]

When groupies and booze show up without invitation, then you have enough tone.

best post in the thread.

[MWJB]

"As RG Keen has explained it many times on this board, you can't help but be influenced by your perceptions, even when you don't want to be. It is not possible to avoid, and that is why, whether the subject is medicine, or wine tasting or tone tasting, proper testing requires at the minumum blind testing, double blind being even better. You want to believe you are capable of not being influenced, the truth is you are not. Go ahead and refute that if it makes you feel better, but the truth remains."

I'm certainly not disputing the validity of blind/double blind testing...it's just not a particularly practical thing to do. Who funds it, every time new product hits the market?

There is also a pattern here of "accepted hearsay" where people believe certain hearsay, but refuse to believe other hearsay...because it suits their perception. If the OP says that the product in question was audibly superior to the other product tested, why not believe that? Why believe other hearsay that still has no blind/double blind tests to the contrary? What happens when you have no "expectation"? Rather than allude to things that have just been said before, point me to the double blind test, robust sample, with full methodology, that shows all cables sound the same?

[Mark Hammer]

I think both Mike and MWJB make some fair points. In ambiguous circumstances, there is burden of proof on both "claimers" and "rejecters".

I think it is also fair to say that, while classic psychophysics research is conducted in the lab, where the only contaminants are perhaps the participant's desire to get the damn thing over with, and whatever obstacles to accurate detection might be in place, once we get into the world of perceptions-with-a-hyperlink, things change. Mistaken inferences, based on "perceptions with contaminants" have a way of turning up on forums and then turning into pandemics of misinformation delivered with absolute certainty. And, I think we can all sheepishly admit that ad copy and reviews are not always the best places to learn about the advantages and limitations of something.

I'd need all of Shiva's arms to even begin to count up the number of misconceptions I've run into in music stores or amongst otherwise bright young people eager to master the world of music technology. Baseless, but still intriguing and seemingly seamless narratives about how some things work or what they can do, or simply "what matters", can easily spread in the internet age.

For that reason, I personally tend to lean towards demanding more proof from claimers than from rejecters. I know that the odds of claimers' claims turning into urban myth are greater than the odds of rejecters' scepticism becoming the norm.

But that's me, YMMV.

[Steve Conner]

best post in the thread.

Yes, obviously a mechanical engineer talking - the hypothesis put forward is testable and the experiment involves booze and women.

I'm certainly not disputing the validity of blind/double blind testing...it's just not a particularly practical thing to do. Who funds it, every time new product hits the market?

Well, nobody, and that's the problem, except it's not really a problem. As has been said, the music technology industry is made of baseless fantasies, and that's the fun of it for the people who participate.

Some important things that would influence the direction of the industry were heavily blind tested. Such as MPEG and JPEG compression, which were standards-based and the standards arrived at by a lot of boffins and a lot of tests to discover the limits of Joe Public's perception of music and images.

People would be stuck with a hell of a lot of content in those formats, so it was important to make sure that they did what it said on the tin. You can always get another pickup or amp, but it's harder to replace your entire MP3 collection.

Some other standards were fantasy-based, though, like the "1-bit" DSD format. You can prove mathematically that it is lossy and messes up your signal by adding idle tones, but Korg still promotes it as the ultimate future-proof master format.

The only quibble I have is the same one that Douglas Self and Rod Elliott bang on endlessly about. If success in the industry is achieved by spinning the best fantasies, it's unfair on actual engineers (such as Self and Elliott, oddly enough) who think they can succeed by actually being good at designing things.

I've never had a groupie ask about my amps, either.