Popular Post Jud Posted February 8 Popular Post Share Posted February 8 "Timbre, the perceptual quality of a sound, is defined as everything by which a listener can distinguish between two sounds with the same loudness, pitch, spatial location, and duration." [Citation omitted.] Timbre therefore includes those subtle differences in sound quality pursued by audiophiles. The academic paper linked below, published in 2019, describes an experiment in which subjects were asked to distinguish timbral differences between sounds while brain response was measured via fMRI. The fMRI eliminates some difficulties in experiments that require a conscious verbal response, such as whether there is a response that is subconscious, or whether the subject is insufficiently certain to give a definite verbal response. The results showed that a (pre-existing) model of timbre constructed from subjective descriptions of timbral differences predicted brain response as measured by fMRI better than 3 models of timbral differences constructed from objective measurements of differences in the sounds themselves, or in lower level auditory processing in the cochlea. That is, at least as of the publication date in 2019, models based on objective measurements didn’t account for the higher level auditory processing in the brain that went into the subjective model. The best performing among the objective models takes into account not only frequency-based but time-based objective characteristics, which makes a nice counterbalance to some objective measurements that tend to concentrate primarily on the frequency-based characteristics of sound reproduction. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5747995/ trey0thompson, semente, PeterG and 3 others 1 5 One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. - Einstein Computer, Audirvana -> optical Ethernet to Fitlet3 -> Fibbr Alpha Optical USB -> iFi NEO iDSD DAC -> Apollon Audio 1ET400A Mini (Purifi based) -> Vandersteen 3A Signature. Link to comment
Jud Posted August 1 Author Share Posted August 1 3 hours ago, pkane2001 said: I think I could come up with a 100% accurate method of differentiating diverse orchestral pieces using any number of existing measurements, without resorting to subjective descriptors or fMRI :) Certainly there are any number of perceptual tasks involving pattern recognition at which humans are currently better than AIs. Of course this comes with a corollary, which is that humans are also prone to recognizing patterns that don’t exist (optical or auditory illusions). Measuring equipment isn’t subject to these (AFAIK). I suppose, depending on how an AI is trained, it might be given the ability to recognize the same sorts of illusions humans are subject to. pkane2001 1 One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. - Einstein Computer, Audirvana -> optical Ethernet to Fitlet3 -> Fibbr Alpha Optical USB -> iFi NEO iDSD DAC -> Apollon Audio 1ET400A Mini (Purifi based) -> Vandersteen 3A Signature. Link to comment
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