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RE: Hey - don't cast aspersions on my knowledge

Posted by rbolaw on November 24, 2014 at 11:50:18

In Reply to: RE: Hey - don't cast aspersions on my knowledge posted by Analog Scott on November 24, 2014 at 09:25:00:

That's fine, I was just answering your question. If it doesn't make sense to you, so be it. And I wasn't presuming anything about what you do or don't know. But it does look like you're the one with the ruffled feathers. No matter.

Edit: OK, I've read the study itself, and imho it is bullshit. Here is why: In the experiments, "the top three finalists in each of 10 prestigious international classical music competitions were presented to participants." The participants more accurately predicted the winners by viewing video clips than sound clips. From this, the authors rather pompously conclude:

Professional training may hone musicians’ technical prowess
and cultivate their expressive range, but in this last bastion of the
realm of sound, it does little to shift our natural and automatic
overweighting of visual cues. After all, sound can be neglected
while trained “ears” focus on the more salient visual cues. It is
unsettling to find—and for musicians not to know—that they
themselves relegate the sound of music to the role of noise.

However, the authors seem not to consider the possibility that sound may still be far more important than visual clues despite their results. For example, all three finalists may sound almost equally good with only very subtle or minute differences, especially in a brief audio clip, but some performers may very obviously look vastly better than others, even in a brief video clip. That's not surprising, because those finalists no doubt got there far more because of their sounds than their looks. But when forced in the end to pick among equally good-sounding candidates, visual clues are the most easily available tiebreakers, and maybe the only ones, if the judges know nothing about the finalists' backgrounds.

Of course, if you spent many hours listening to each of those finalists, the sound differences between them might gradually become more clear. But that wasn't how these experiments were designed. In the real world, it's sometimes the competitors who finish second or third or even lower in those big competitions who end up having the major careers. So visual cues may matter less when people have more time to listen.

That make enough sense for you, Scott?

Edits: 11/24/14

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