How do you hear tones?, Find out inside Options

[Continuum]

The last edition of the German (snake-oil) HiFi-magazine AUDIO reported on some interesting recent research on hearing. They claim humanity is made up of two types of listeners: the fundamental tone hearer and the overtone hearer. They go on and say that the former is prevalently hearing with the left side of his brain and usually prefers melodic music and higher instruments (piano, violin, flute), while the latter is hearing with his ride side and favours instruments with rich timbre (voice, bassoon, cello).

There is a simple test, to find out to which class you belong. A pair of sounds is played and you decide whether the frequency is increasing or decreasing.

Here is the file: audio.de - overtone.flac
There is a total of 12 pairs. A German-speaking voice introduces each iteration and every pair is repeated once. For each sequence jot down, whether you thought the frequency to be increasing or decreasing.

Afterwards compare your results with this table:

CODE

       incr    decr
1               x
2               x
3       x        
4       x        
5       x        
6       x        
7               x
8               x
9       x        
10              x
11              x
12      x        

The more your results agree with this list, the more you are a fundamental tone hearer. If your result is the exact inverse of the above, you are a pure overtone hearer.

[echo]

12/12, so I guess I'm 100% fundamentalist! And it's true that I like piano and flute more than cello and bassoon...