On 31/05/2012 01:27, etienne deleflie wrote:
Although I don’t ascribe to a single 'school' of psychology, I do buy into
James Gibson's idea that man (and animals) and their environments are
inseparable (this is at the heart of Ecological Psychology).
I think (or at least hope) that James Gibson's ideas are slowly making
their way into the field of audio engineering. What I like about Gibson's
ideas is that they remove the emphasis on physical modelling.
So long as they are applied carefully and taking due notice that he concentrated on the visual
system, which is significantly different from the auditory one - to use their terminology, it exists
within a connected but different ecology.
An other aspect of Gibson's ideas that are interesting concerns the
difference between mediated environments and non-mediated environments.
Gibson argues that it is impossible for a mediated environment to ever be
confused with a non-mediated environment... no matter how good the
technology. The reasons are environmental again. Ofcourse, that doesn't
mean that there cant be a 'suspension of disbelief' ... but some argue that
the suspension of disbelief is the domain of art, not science. It is the
expression (of the art) that fools the perception (not the stimuli).
Here, to any extent, I depart from Gibson. With sufficiently advanced technology there comes a
point at which the effort required to suspend disbelief is so small as to be negligible. I was
reading a report on a paper a few months ago (I think in New Scientist) where the authors were
suggesting that some on-line gamers have difficult perceiving the "real world" as actually being
real when they come out of the games. This suggests that even with the relatively poor systems we
have at present (compared with what we know will be possible in future since it only needs
evolution, not revolution, in the technology), the barrier to suspension has already become low. Now
I am not suggesting that we would be able to recreate exactly a particular person's experience of
going to a particular concert - at least, without Total Recall type technology (and, despite the
advances with fMRI technology we are a loooong way off that) - but I do think we will be able to
have a pretty good shot at giving someone the experience of going to that concert themselves
. Personally, I am starting to
question that the centrality of 'direction', not just evident in audio
synthesis interfaces but also evident in the underlying theory of
ambisonics (and in Gerzon's ideas), is not actually just a direct result of
the limitations of a laboratory based scientific understanding of sound
perception. I wonder if perhaps direction is *not* that important to
spatial audio. Ofcourse, it is a part, but is it central? This view leads
to the questioning of the value of higher order ambisonics.
But if you get the position of all the sound sources right, everything else falls into place - note
I said position, note just direction, though that is necessarily essential.
Dave
--
These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer
/*********************************************************************/
/* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */
/* Music Research Centre */
/* Department of Music "http://music.york.ac.uk/"; */
/* The University of York Phone 01904 322448 */
/* Heslington Fax 01904 322450 */
/* York YO10 5DD */
/* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */
/* "http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/"; */
/*********************************************************************/
_______________________________________________
Sursound mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
