On Feb 5, 2005, at 8:34 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
Hi Chuck,
Well, clearly, we cannot perceive frequencies beyond those that our hardware is capable of conveying to our brains. Other animals with different hardware perceive a different range of frequencies. Some animals (e.g., bats) even have auditory perceptual abilities we can only replicate with the aid of advanced technology.
Depends on what you mean by "percieve". Bass frequencies below what we are supposed to be able to hear raise our blood pressure, pulse, and adrenaline levels, kind of like a scary movie would.
I don't know if that's quite what you meant, though.
- Darcy
He might be referring to the studies that found that hearing perfect intervals raised endorphin levels by a miniscule amount in the subjects, which supports the theory that we are "hard-wired" to perceive music in a certain way.
Hey, Darcy and Christopher, thanks for turning this opinion-fest into a useful discussion! A number of years ago a quotation was going around from a couple of Temple University professors to the effect that the normal human brain IS hard-wired for music, although the KIND of music is culturally determined. Certainly is true for language. These questions regarding perception have been studied for over a century, and the work of von Bekesy and others at Muppet Labs ... oops, that should be Bell Labs ... in the first half of the 20th century showed how well basic research can be and has been applied to practical engineering.
I like the hardware/software analogy, although technically it should be wetware because it is constantly changing, and not just because the physical brain changes as a child grows. The "software" really DOES change the wetware, and we call those changes "learning." But the wetware either permits or does not permit us to do certain things. The best example that comes to mind is absolute pitch. I don't have the wetware designed for it, but I've known enough people who do to accept that it does exist, and some studies (badly controlled, unfortunately) associate it with a very specific part of the brain. And high/low frequency perception probably falls unto the same category.
Traditional educational methodology assumes that we best learn by perfecting one thing at a time. That definitely applies to the Suzuki approach to music, and to the teaching of foreign language through studying rules of grammar and memorizing lists of vocabulary words. But that is not how the young human actually learns. A baby is surrounded by sensory input, what the Gestalt psychologists would call a "rich" environment, but has (or develops) the ability to focus on specific things within that environment--the shifting foreground/background phenomenon--and learns at an awe-inspiring rate.
And there's also the fact of readiness periods, which have been linked to physical developments in the wetware. A newborn does not have all the mylein sheathing (I take full credit for all misspellings of words I haven't seen or thought about for years!!) complete on all the nerves, and once that happens there are specific learning periods for language, music, and many other things during which the wetware is ready and able to learn at a truly amazing rate that will never, if those periods are missed, be possible as that child gets older. Four-year-olds can learn to read easily, but not if there are no books in the home. The buzz lately seems to be that the judgement functions of the wetware are not fully functional until something like age 20, which if true certainly explains teenagers!!
What is it that the human genome project seems to have found? That the genetic difference between us and lab rats amounts to something like only 2% of the total genome? Well, that 2% sure does make possible a lot of stuff, including the appreciation of barbershop harmony and the ability to discuss atonality, consonance, and the whichness of the why.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
