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Oohashi

Posted by tlyyra (A) on April 21, 2007 at 11:28:47

In Reply to: Re: it's frequently cited in serious studies posted by KlausR. on April 21, 2007 at 07:56:30:

Hi Klaus,

I need to do a better check: for now I just ran a quick Google search and found citations by people such as David Griesinger (of Lexicon), James Boyk (director of Cal Tech music lab and lecturer in its dept. of electrical engineering), and a bunch of faculty at psychology, music, and various tech depts. around the States(Berkeley etc.). Plus a co-authored piece in an audio engineering journal in Germany (which I can't recall now). These were all references that seemed to take the Oohashi et al. paper seriously. And then of course the references in Stereophile and other audio fora.

From my quick search I was not able to find any refutations of either the hypotheses or the research procedure, though that may be because the research questions simply haven't been adequately put to test yet. (Meaning it's just too hard to evaluate, apart from the test setup and methodology, but even they seemed fine at a quick glance.) What seemed to be a novelty in the Oohashi 2000 paper is that the audio clips were longer, as were the pauses in between them; the assumption being that certain physiological responses only become manifest rather slowly (compared to the usual few seconds done in audio tests) and have a correspondingly slower settling time afterwards (have a hang time).

I would think J of Neurophysiology must be quite a respectable publication in the field (of which I know nothing to be sure). There was moreover another paper by Oohashi in 2006 in Elsevier's Brain Research journal, 16 February 2006, in which the conclusions are that this HF effect with a bearing on listening preferences and manifest in brain function responses may not have anything to do with "the conventional air-conducting auditory system," since this effect was manifest "only when the listener's entire body surface was exposed to High Frequency Components, but not when HFC was presented exclusively to the air-conducting auditory system." (They used a loudspeakers vs. headphones type of a setup.)

Oohashi himself has a nice career behind him (from Wikipedia - ):

"He held positions such as Instructor at Tsukuba University, Professor at the National Institute of Multimedia Education, Professor at Chiba Institute of Technology, and General manager at the Department of KANSEI Brain Science, ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories. He is the President of the Yamashiro Institute of Science and Culture and the Director and chief researcher of the Foundation for the Advancement of International Science."

I just find this quite intriguing as a hypothetical issue. Not sure what the repercussions would be for audio design; there are just too many variables involved, even if Oohashi & co. are right. (The research reported in the J Neurophysiology issue was based on double blind testing and the results were statistically significant.)

More stuff to read, that is. What's your take on all this?

TL

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