source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 10:26:35 -0700 Subject: Re: Brian's psychoacoustics From: Bill Alves My goodness, judging from Brian's post, I'm ignorant and yet know enough to have a nefarious "hidden agenda" to twist the facts to serve my own proselytization for just intonation. Among the things I am supposed to have claimed or implied are: that the ear is a machine that performs fourier analysis (that different parts of the basilar membrane are responsive to different frequencies in no way implies that it performs a fourier transform), and that "higher brain regions" are involved in pitch determination (though the neural pathways and brain are no doubt involved, I cannot say how "high"). When I decide to compose with just intonation, I do so only because that is what I like to hear, not because of any current research or intellectual number-crunching (though I do not dispute the importance of the research). Now, maybe my ears are fooling me, as Brian seems to suggest, but I prefer to trust my ears rather than abstract reasoning when composing, if it comes down to that. At any rate, I have grown to have a healthy skepticism about acoustics research that purports to show that something cannot be heard or is not musically significant based on contrived A/B blind tests. Among the other things that have been "proven" this way is that difference tones have no musical significance. Oh, and Brian, I'm happy to see that you have come out against unproductive flames. Does that include bigoted remarks about musicians in academia? Bill Alves Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 07:49 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id WAA13730; Wed, 27 Sep 1995 22:49:17 -0700 Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 22:49:17 -0700 Message-Id: <950928040207_71670.2576_HHB23-4@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu