An interesting demonstration
The woman whose name is Poppy does a mind bending demonstration of how suggestion can dictate what we hear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ
61 responses Add your response
I’ve recommended James " JJ " Johnston who is in the video as one to read before but he doesn’t say what most want to hear on this forum. He’s a regular poster on ASR if you wish to learn about Psychoacoustics you can read some of his papers. https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jjs-signal-processing-and-psychoacoustics-mas... |
@artemus_5 , It is very hard to take Paul Mcgowan seriously. This has nothing to do with the topic which is Poppy's demonstration. djones, thanks for the link. I have run into him before but have not read him extensively. I will trundle through these articles. I'm sure he is antithetical to the mythology advanced by many audiophiles who insist on taking their own hearing seriously. One should never make a determination after one "trial" of unblinded hearing. The simple truth is that if it looks better it will sound better. If it costs more it will sound better. Neither cost not looks is a determinant of sound quality. I use to sell cheap Marantz receivers (we got spiffed on these) by blind ABing the customer with expensive Accuphase separates. They could never tell the difference and happily bought the Marantz when they discovered it sounded just as good. |
OK I listened to Poppy. The demo of Stairway to heaven, etc is something I have heard before. I wouldn't call it mind bending. Someone had to hear the words first. then write those words down so it could be shown on the screen. Is this what you are calling "suggestion" of what we hear? Yes, She is suggesting. But she has gotten her "suggestions" from someone who first heard the words and wrote them down. |
@artemus_5, you can twist things any way you want but you had no idea what was going on until you saw the lyrics. Neither did any one else. Any one can listen over and over again to any song backwards and come up with some plausible lyrics. @tomcy6, The speakers we were demonstrating with and the room situation were so poor I can not make a comment as to sound quality. I can say the Accuphase was much better built. But these people were never going to spring for the Accuphase, way too expensive. I was selling the Marantz over other brands I did not get "spiffed" on like Onkyo, Pioneer and Sanyo. Spiffed means we were getting a bonus on top of the usual commission. The owner did this for equipment he wanted to move for whatever reason. These inexpensive receivers were all pretty much the same. Marantz was easy to move because of the name and it looked great. There were plenty of things some of the salesman did that were clearly unethical like demonstrating speakers out of phase to switch the customer. Most of the speakers back then were garbage. I think the little Dynaco A 25s were the best speaker we sold. We did carry Ohm speakers but back then I did not care for them. The owner did not care for carrying large speakers. We carried mostly bookshelf speakers. I was plenty happy to get out of there. Once I got a clientele going I sold equipment only from two High end stores. |
They wrote the words they wanted to write. Without the suggestion you aren't hearing actual words. They could have written anything and as long as it's read or spoken along with it it's going to make it seem right. This, I believe was used to demonstrate the evils of rock and roll by a religeous organization. It wouldn't have they same effect as if they were worshipping the Great Pumpkin. The power of suggestion is used to sell the illusion. Repeat man made climate change enough and see what happens. Oh.... wait.... |
I particularly smiled at the "Brilliant Pebbles" and the "Quantum Clips". Like it or not, the industry is rife with people ripping off the gullible and proving PT Barnum correct on a daily basis. I certainly do understand the comb filtering explanation and have proven the point in my own room. Also, the nature of humans to beleive that which we read on a regular basis and to be led by the different forms of bias. Interesting post and it confirms my general reluctance and slow research process before purchasing anything. |
| Post removed |
Watched the video. First thing that came to mind: with recording industry professionals like that, is it any wonder why so many recordings sound the way they do? And the choice of music for the “examples”? Good Lord! He lost me early on with the claim that when we listen for the bass (or treble, or whatever…) that is the only thing that we will hear or be able to judge. Speak for yourself, dude! Some of what he says about the power of suggestion can be true. So what? In no way does that mean that what astute and discerning listeners hear cannot be real nor repeatable. |
Watched the video. First thing that came to mind: with recording industry professionals like that, is it any wonder why so many recordings sound the way they do? And the choice of music for the “examples”? Good Lord! He lost me early on with the claim that when we listen for the bass (or treble, or whatever…) that is the only thing that we will hear or be able to judge. Speak for yourself, dude!Great post by a master musician mr.frogman...Thanks... He lost me also after 5 minutes... 😁😊 I will listen to it completely though....Thanks the op for the video... The second speaker in the beginning use some good psychological science : if you concentrate on bass you will not perceive high in the same way that if you concentrate on highs ...True, but no musician and no lover of music concentrate on limited set of frequencies at the expanse of others, we listen music timbre microdynamic playing notes ...We dont do psychological experiment in our audio room listening music... Instead of concentrating on some specific limited bandwith like a microphone in a sound test , why not listening the specific timbre microdynamic playing? I use that timbre perception to create my acoustic room setting...Am i deluded? Some here will say yes probably, erasing the fact that we cannot explain human hearing ability by only placebo, uneducated biases, and wrong brain working.... For sure suggestion is powerfully true in his effect on ANYBODY mind ... So what? A maestro or an acoustician or a lover of music could also be deluded on DETAILS but could also overpower them by TRAINING in concentrating on the WHOLE not on details.... Alternatives exist between 2 details at different levels, but there is one way to judge a trumpet timbre playing a note, this a single phenomenon at one level...There exist a "relative" musical consensus about that.... Timbre is a WHOLENESS unexplained by addition of frequencies on a screen or by someone listening wrongfully alternate details ...Fourier transform dont explain timbre...Timbre is not a spectrum....Save for uneducated people... An acoustician could use timbre with his ears to set a room in relation to a specific speakers set, is it a deluded dude when he claim that he could do it IN SPITE of the way the brain and/or the room could play tricks? Audiophiles attentive to UNRELATED details like bass spectrum or high spectrum at different volumes are not a maestro listening the WHOLE orchestra and picking some defect in a single trumpet player.... Is the maestro deluded by some placebo or effect of his brain wrong working? Is a measuring device the only way to touch sound and musical reality ? And ANYWAY hearing something which is not there acoustically is precisely the definition of what music is...Read this sentence 2 times i will not repeat it.... If you want to know why this is so, buy a psycho-acoustic science book.... The truth is audiophiles, subjctivist or objectivist one, are completely conditioned by marketing of the audio ENGINEERING field "frequencies" analysis vocabulary...Music lover and musician dont buy the hype and dont mind placebo or biases listening a musical chord...They judge their audio system by listening the only supremum meter in psycho-acoustic : human voice timbre recognition speech and singing ...Singular or choral.... «Each timbre playing microdynamic tonality is an integrated cosmos, like a human figure, perceived by the listener or the musician, not a bunch of frequencies or details which can be separated or assembled by a machine or an untrained or unfocused brain»-Anonymus Musician |
Not really sure she's "proves" anything except the cognitive link between our senses. If you now know what the hidden words are and play it again without reading them, do you hear them. I don't. Merely them being suggested is not enough to hear them, reading them at the same time is. It's rather like singing to a record where you think you know the words what you sing is not what's on the record, but that is what you hear. |
dadork, great explanation. phjcollie, as you note in the posts below yours you can see why the industry works the way it does. People are under the illusion that they know what is going on. As a mental exercise try adding 16 +24 at the same time adding 48+32. Those are easy additions and some of us can do it in rapid succession but none of us can do it at the exact same time. Listening is no different. Listen to a choir, pick out one voice then pick out another voice. Try and listen to them together at the exact same time. Your mind can bounce back and forth quickly between the two but you can not listen to both at the same time unless you ignore the individuality of the voices listening to the choir as one voice like you would listen to McCoy Tyner playing the piano. If you want to listen to one note you have to switch to Monk. You can only listen to or, the better term is "study" one detail at a time. With the infinite number of details in any recording the likelihood of anyone listening to a recording exactly the same way, paying attention to the exact same details in succession is non existent. Every time you listen to a recording you hear it the same but listen/study it differently. This creates the illusion that you are hearing new things when you are only studying different ones. This is not my opinion but a well proven fact. |
Listen to a choir, pick out one voice then pick out another voice. Try and listen to them together at the exact same time. Your mind can bounce back and forth quickly between the two but you can not listen to both at the same time unless you ignore the individuality of the voices listening to the choir as one voice like you would listen to McCoy Tyner playing the piano. If you want to listen to one note you have to switch to Monk. You can only listen to or, the better term is "study" one detail at a time. Like i already said,"😁😊 hearing something which is not there acoustically is precisely the definition of what music is..." I added that this is explained by psycho-acoustic science not physical acoustic... Then you are not EVEN wrong in your misconception of what hearing music is... I will explain to you in few words.... When someone listen to any music his conscious experience thinking,feeling,will, is conditioned ALSO with ALL his subconscious present and past experience... Then his "integral being/brain " pick all there is to pick but not only consciously and his consciousness is ALWAYS a relatively guided and trained perception...You know that a feeling is also a sensation participating in the perception and not reducible to conscious perception? You know what trained perception means no? In music listening the "creative imagination" at work is not ALWAYS and ONLY "illusion" and "placebo" but participate to the creation in the body/brain of the musical experience and perception conscious and subconscious... In a famous experience the great neurologist Libet proved that our brain/body decided to act BEFORE our conscious decision, milli seconds and even seconds BEFORE our conscious decision...( it is called the readiness potential)... I will not explain why this does not negate " free will" here save for superficial materialists or scientism...My point here is to illustrate the active participation of the subconscious integrating ALL the past history of the listener through one perception which is ALWAYS a trained perception...Call them a set of educated biases...And calling these biases only merely illusions is complete ignrance and the reason why you are NOT EVEN WRONG...You throw the baby with the polluted waters thats all you do.... Then all your posts reflect not something wrong, it is more than being wrong, it is HALF TRUTH, like famously said the physicist Feynman... YOU ARE NOT EVEN WRONG... Then you are very far to understand even only the problem itself which is a PROBLEM in psycho-acoustic science related to the way the brain/body recreate the Tonal timbre with a "missing fundamental....I will not explain why.... Do your homework .... In a word THE TIMBRE IS NOT THE SPECTRUM and physical acoustic is half part of the problem to solve and psycho-acoustic the other part... i can reference all that i just wrote.... This creates the illusion that you are hearing new things when you are only studying different ones. This is not my opinion but a well proven fact.Then deconstructing Toscanini experience like the gesture of a trained dog dont tell all the story of human perception save for people unable to distinguish audio and music, and think that electronic engineering EXPLAIN ALL...And assimilating Toscanini to a gullible audio consumer is not science either... You are not even wrong my friend! You cannot state a problem without and before being able to state with the problem his different aspects and terms correctly... We cannot mimic knowledge with short ready made answer coming from blind test in psycho-acoustic like on a circus theater ruled by Objectivist debunker of Subjectivist gullible customers... I read nothing of the sort in psycho-acoustic books .... A simple example for children: A rainbow perception is NOT an "illusion".....It is way more complex than that.... All my observations can be state with only this remark...A tonal timbre microdynamic perception of an orchestra is like a rainbow... I hope you will think out of your scientism agenda....James Randy claims are not science... Guess why? |
@mijostyn My smiles are related to the items being sold as the comedy of the icebreaker he used to open his part of the presentation. It is the few bad apples that make cynics and skeptics of us all. I see some good points made regarding changes made in the inaudible range, as well as the claim that a person was hearing a phase shift in a 10 foot guitar chord. There are some valid points being made in Winers presentation, but I disagree with some of the generalities regarding how people listen and what we remember or hear. He also has a very nice listening room and some quality equipment and instruments. He does a fair job of busting some myths and outlining how Flether Munson Curves can be involved in what we hear or like. Lastly, I have seen the trick he posted regarding the speaker companies who use averaged third octave for the graph as well as enlaging the gradients on the Y axis. I take everything with a grain of salt or two but it would be obtuse to disregard everything in his presentation. Unless of course we are in the business of selling those Brilliant Pebbles ;) Cheers. |
Selling costly cables with marketing " false science" is one thing, thinking that debunking that is "pure science" is another propaganda piece... It is reducing a potential phenomena to his speech justification by the alleged "crook" or a circus by the "debunker"...Cables could be linked to different perception in different system...This is a fact easy to experiment with....Selling these cables at a high price is another fact unrelated to their real positive or negative effect... Claiming we are all deluded when the brain create music from the sounding bodies of an orchestra through the waves imaging information is reducing music phenomena and perception to physical sound waves...Simplistic... I dont sell anything by the way save ideas and experiments...even with quartz and other "peebles".... For sure crooks exist, but this does not justify blind test debunking circus no more that the crooks discourse explain cable comparison... I am sure that there is interesting facts in this video but the beginning convey the hallmark of an engineering point of view not of a musician or a psycho-acoustician... |
I never bought any "tweaks" nor anything costly AT ALL ....Never.... But instead of bad mouthing what seems to me honest people i dont know on audio thread, like Paul Mcgowan, i experiment with no cost devices of my own making... Then i dont make of myself a fool who will buy costly "tweaks" or not less worst, a debunker who hold more to his debunking ideology than to experimenting with devices... My motto is: Dont upgrade before embedding mechanically, electrically and acoustically the gear.... Dont buy "tweaks" try to replicate them at no cost.... Most of the times acoustic low cost treatment and cheap home made mechanical controls beat most gear upgrade.... Try to debunk my method....Good luck.... Some fools have tried, and call all my system : placebos... Some other reviewer fool have tried, and call my system Low-Fi Thats all.... But i laugh at all these fools because my system not being the best in the world for sure beat everything in the S.Q./price ratio scale... Then.... Reading debunkers and reviewers alike i smile.... |
What we are lacking here is Mozartfan to explain how he can implement the Pebbles and The Clip into his next perfect speaker design. I am willing to spring for the rock polisher.You have 239 posts and you can laugh your way up to peebles or tin foil use if you want and if it is the only positive work you can do in audio...But try to not insult people when they dont speak to you especially in their back...( i dont mind which will be the people name you will use) And try not to assimilate all people you dont like in the same bag with a name you dont like associated to it.... Only a remark about elementary politeness... But you can insult me now if it is the only thing you can give here because i speak to you... Anyway i wish you the best.... |
I see my problem now, I did not buy the "Super Intelligent Chip". Glad to see how it is light activated. (This from the manufacturer of the Brilliant Pebbles). I'm supposed to put the chip on top of the cd player. While the disk is inside, playing...... the CD player isn't really airtight or light-tight - it's actually a "leaky box" with many small openings and gaps in the chassis through which light can easily pass. The CD laser light reaches the Intelligent Chip by escaping through gap around the CD tray and fillingI up the room. The Intelligent Chip's photons reach the interior of the player the same way, through the gap around the CD tray.http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina64.htm |
@mijostyn Listen to a choir, pick out one voice then pick out another voice. Try and listen to them together at the exact same time. Your mind can bounce back and forth quickly between the two but you can not listen to both at the same time unless you ignore the individuality of the voices. Kudos on your description of this difficulty. It captures something very real about the challenge of evaluating audio. My initial approach to such events is to initially take them as single experience, which later turns out (on inspection) to have multiple parts. Scenic views come across this way, as well. Looking at a landscape, I don't go jumping around from one particular to another, but "take in the whole." Indeed, most of our experience of eating is exactly about the combination of flavors and not the individual flavors. I guess my point would be that the experience of the combination can be as immediate as the experience of the particular; indeed, the experience of a particular which is embedded in a larger whole involves the mental act where we have to "prescind" or "abstract out" something which only then gets our selective attention. But in the initial moment, we experience (what we'll later call) the complex. But we experience it as a simple. This point -- about the complex whole -- doesn't really defuse the difficulty you pose, because there again, we can *take* that whole complex in various ways, each time. (Is the landscape cheery? Is it plaintive? Is it intimidating? Etc.) So, how could we ever compare? -- that would be the challenging question. I'd start the answer with the word "habit." I cannot hear a choir in a million different ways for the same reason I cannot see a staircase in a million different ways. I have habits of listening, habits of staircase maneuvering; habits of tasting. These habits become my bases of comparison; they allow me to compare one listening session to the next, and because I'm a self-in-society (and not a random self), I can gain insight from what you hear and perhaps hear it that way, myself. |
Looking at a landscape, I don’t go jumping around from one particular to another, but "take in the whole." Indeed, most of our experience of eating is exactly about the combination of flavors and not the individual flavors.Great post.... I was saying to him the same thing in a post above about WHOLENESS ... A take by the ear of a maestro on an aspect of musical orchestral sound is a "perspective" focused from a detail to the whole and from the whole to the detail... Tonal Timbre microdynamic playing is a "perspectival information " between the properties of a sounding body and the other objects in resonance with him... We human can "see " music not only hear it... Consciousness is a "learned" power by a spirit not a mere fixed ability mechanically reproducible which wait to be debunk... |
I guess my point would be that the experience of the combination can be as immediate as the experience of the particular; indeed, the experience of a particular which is embedded in a larger whole involves the mental act where we have to "prescind" or "abstract out" something which only then gets our selective attention. But in the initial moment, we experience (what we'll later call) the complex. But we experience it as a simple.Gestalt? Right? Long before the time we're composing our thoughts here (around 1/1/2 yrs of age) we've mastered the task of seeing the whole and not fixate on the parts. So what if we can't (or can we?) really, truly, and exactly differentiate two voices singing at the same time? We bask in the harmony and yet are able to discern individuals all the time even when they seem to compete for our attention. Take a good listen to Lakme's Duo des Fleurs and tell me you can't distinguish between Sabine Devieilhe (coloratura soprano) and Maienane Crebassa (mezzo-soprano) at the same time. I can. The mind works so quickly so as to render the argument that it's impossible to hear both rather silly. That's splitting hairs to the point of red herring territory. There is a lag in time with everything we do and yet we still catch balls, drive cars and bikes and some can even juggle. It's all done so fast that it's a non issue. All the best, Nonoise |
@nonoise @mahgister -- Agree on the immediacy of the whole. I avoided the word "gestalt" because that word implies the way a thing has been “placed” or “put together." I think we're all agreeing that this larger whole *starts out* as fundamentally simple. I also see the OP's question as a live one, though. How do we take in that whole (whether a complex-simple or a simple-simple) consistently over time? Hard question. |
@nonoise @mahgister -- Agree on the immediacy of the whole. I avoided the word "gestalt" because that word implies the way a thing has been “placed” or “put together." I think we’re all agreeing that this larger whole *starts out* as fundamentally simple.Deep question! I myself discover the beginning of an answer in many science of philosophical books... The main one tough was the works of Goethe... Especially his work on morphology of plants and animals...And his color theory complement that... His method is nothing short of astounding, like explained it, in many books, the Bohmian physicist Henri Bortoft... But the clearest explanation was the monumental treatise about animal morphology after Goethe and Rudolf Steiner method...By the biologist Wolfgang Schad, a life changing book...This is the clearest explanation of Goethe natural science method with Bortoft in the last 50 years... http://www.adonispress.org/threefoldness.php “Do not seek for anything behind the phenomena: They themselves are the theory.” “The most difficult thing is to see what lies directly before our eyes.” – J. W. Goethe The same goes for the sound-musical-experience and for hearing... How do we perceive the wholenees that is before our own eyes and all around us in sound experience? By changing the way we observe phenomenon....By becoming "Conscious" observer... Believe it or not, but there is a method to train ourself to see a phenomenon in his perspectival encompassing dimensions... His wholeness.. All the books i just cited illustrated in DETAILS and explained how.... For the musical consciousness experience and history.... The 2 books which are not explicitly Goethean, are also Goethean implicitly though... Ernest Ansermet develop a phenomenology of the musical experience inspired by Husserl, which goes hand in hand with the Goethean approach...( Goethe is the first and the greatest phenomenologist way before the mathematician Husserl because his phenomenology is based on natural science not on mathematical logic) Another book almost unknown this time, which is a doctorate thesis by Akpan J. Essien : Sound sources the origin of auditory sensations complement perfectly Ansermet book this time about sound and not about music first like Ansermet who was also one of the greatest maestro...( Essien comes from Africa and it is not the best place to come from to critic 2000 years of acoustic research in Occident but he succeed in making his doctorate in England and France) In all These books the manifestation of the WHOLENESS through parts of any phenomenon is explained and a method of observation (for visual experience) and even experiments ( for sound experience) is exposed... The KEY principle here it to know that the relation between part and whole is a dynamical internal process THROUGH the observer and what is observed, not an EXTERNAL static relation between an external observer and an external object..... I cannot resume these many thousand pages, in plants and animal morphology. in acoustic and in music and other fields in a few words... My post is here to say yes the wholeness perceived experience is a mystery but not completely hidden or totally veiled for us... There is only ONE thinker in European history whom was at the same times one of the greatest writer and poet of all times like Homer and Shakespeare and a rival of Newton and Darwin with his mastery of natural science...Nowadays the ideas of Goethe, instead of appearing completely out of date appear in a total new light... His name is Goethe... His genius is almost unmatched in history....It is on the same level which was revealed by Da Vinci creative imagination in art and nature and technology and Archimedes founder of the phenomenological physics and almost before Newton creator of the calculus.....The antikhythera mechanism come probably from the archimedean school...Anyway there is a link between the archimedean method in phenomenological and mathematical physics and Goethe and Faraday methods... |
@hilde45, At first I was going to disagree but I remembered that gestalt is a psychological term so "placed" and "put together" make sense in that respect. A different kind of perception from a different, but relevant field. The OP's question is a complex one if one gives it too much consideration as I find it akin to how a fundamentalist would argue. Forget the whole, the sum of the parts, the everything, and argue some minutiae, some basic part, and elevate that to the whole in order to negate what is real, what is apparent, and deny it's existence, relevance or importance. All the best, Nonoise |
@nonoise Yep -- that’s exactly the sleight of hand that this panel is embarked upon. Fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Whitehead called it.Thanks for your post.... Very good description if we use Whitehead idea of the fundamental error which reduce the complexities of a concrete phenomenon, sound and music experience, to only one of his aspect, some details, mistakingly taken for the whole and erroneously "proven" (blind test) to be the only concrete reality by an ideological stance.... |
Hilde45, That is an interesting distinction. Listening to the landscape instead of individual instruments. I think I inferred that with the choir analogy. I certainly listen to the landscape with complicated pieces like a symphony unless a particular instrument sticks out that I am interested in. The problem is I do not listen that way when I am evaluating sound. Listening to music and evaluating sound are two distinctly different endeavors. As soon as you start evaluating imaging by default you are listening to individual instruments and where they are, how big they are and so forth. The situation is complicated enough that I am not sure "Habit" applies other that you might listen to bass first and rhythm guitar second. But, for how long and when? The odds of you doing it exactly the same way are very high. nonoise, you are making it far more complicated than it actually is. Why? Personal bias perhaps. Cigars make me sick. |
The fact that "music" is not sound perception ONLY, illustrate the misconception about what acoustic is precisely in his scope.... We cannot hear what we are unable to name first...Save a noise without physionomy.... But for example a good acoustician can SEE the sound in a room... Like some blinds navigate street without help by echolocation... Acoustic laws are not equation on a sheet of paper only or electronic computer equalization impersonal program, but they MAY be perceived phenomena in a room...My mechanical equalizer is precisely that... And what we are able to name we may hear it in a chaotic crowd of instruments... And we must learn how to perceive to name something... A cigar is a cigar for someone who know that he must smoke it, otherwise it is an herb packet... And nonoise say something meaningful here mijostyn , dont throw a personal argument against him.... This wrong way to argue has a name in a debate.... He said that picking the trump of an elephant when keeping blinders could mask the overall geometry of the object... |
I certainly listen to the landscape with complicated pieces like a symphony unless a particular instrument sticks out that I am interested in.The problem is I do not listen that way when I am evaluating sound. Listening to music and evaluating sound are two distinctly different endeavors When I was learning to listen critically last year, someone (Darko?) suggested listening not only with focused attention, but to do a crossword puzzle (e.g.) while listening. Almost a "peripheral vision" kind of move. This would help one shift to a mode of listening which, while attentive, was not acting like a microscope. (So many visual metaphors! So few aural ones!) To stick with the visual analogies for a moment, when I go to a museum, I start off by standing about 6 feet from a painting; then, I go in close to look at various details, then I back up.Landscape or single element -- they're all attended to critically in this process (for me). |
There are just as many if not more factors that make up a great audio performance, timbre, location, size, dimensionality, detail, dynamics, focus. Both your system and the source have to provide all of that and you have to pay attention to all of it. As a mental exercise can you do it all at once? I certainly can not. |