[LAU] re Subconscious Affecting Music

Brent Busby brent at keycorner.org
Fri Sep 3 15:30:13 UTC 2010


On Fri, 3 Sep 2010, Arvind Venkatasubramanian wrote:

> Brent: Very Interesting.  But that's the skill of trained drummers to 
> control the bandwidth of the spectrum by their playing skills.  In the 
> subjective memory music, if I listen to a note in a melody or 
> percussion just 5 seconds back, I can have control over sound level, 
> if I want to change sound level and pitch control, if I want pitch 
> control.
>
> But after 10 minutes, I cannot do that.  But from what you say, a 
> drummer can do it anytime he wants because he is actually tweaking the 
> matter (waveFORM) and not accessing (his?) mind.

It's really something he's doing in the listener's mind though, not his 
own.  When you play louder, simplistically speaking, you're not really 
raising pitch.  (I say simplistically, because sometimes actually you 
are:  Hitting a drumhead harder can actually momentarily increase its 
tuning tension, but that's not always what's going on.  Most of it 
really is the subject effect I'm talking about.)  The drummer is taking 
advantage of the way people tend to hear higher volumes as higher 
pitches.

I'm thinking probably it's just another manifestation of the same 
phenomenon in the way you remember melodies after some time passes.

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky


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