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.

[Lyx]

The main flaw in the claim they make, is that they turning "effect" into "cause". Or asume both to be equal. Thats a typical mistake often done by those who apply natural science to psychology.

Essentially, what they get as the "effect" is: people who prefer tone-class A, have higher activity in the left side of the brain. And for those who prefer tone-class B, the opposite is true.

This is a valid statement about the effect they are seeing. They do however then make an invalid conclusion about the "cause". Being natural science chauvinists, they exclude any "mind->body" cause beforehand (because natural science cannot handle that :) and automatically asume a "body->mind" cause. Thus, they asume "people like tone-class A more beCAUSE of their brain-structure dictates them to do so".

Thus, they use a test-method which has well known shortcomings, and then fix those shortcomings by making invalid asumptions about the testobject". Why? Well, because natural science works great in the material domain, but not at all in the mental domain. Thus, they fix it by simply asuming that you have no consciousness. But as every HA.org reader knows by the rule of the holy TOS#8, this is bullshit. Of course, it may be the case that their asumption is correct. But they cannot know beforehand.

- Lyx

This post has been edited by Lyx: Feb 6 2007, 01:49

[Kees de Visser]

The main flaw in the claim they make, is that they turning "effect" into "cause". Or asume both to be equal. Thats a typical mistake often done by those who apply natural science to psychology.

Who are "they"? The Austrian research team or the German HiFi journalists ?
This thread is new to me, so I might have missed a few things.
If this test is part of a scientific study, are there any links to the sources available ? Thanks.

Kees de Visser
(FWIW: 12/12, pianist and recording engineer)

[Kees de Visser]

(FWIW: 12/12, pianist and recording engineer)

Out of curiosity I redid the test recently (almost 4 years later) and the result remains exactly the same, 12/12.
I wonder if the researchers came to any conclusions. Has anyone seen publications about the subject ?