Do we all hear the same

[ALRAINBOW]

Do we all really hear the same ??? | General discussions and miscellaneous ramblings | Forums | PS Audio

[mwheelerk]

I'm sorry, what did you say?

[elcorso]

There is no way to know.

 

Roch

[ALRAINBOW]

But this does not stop, some of us from feeling we are right and some others feel they are wrong.

[mwheelerk]

But this does not stop,us from all feeling we are right and everyone else is wrong

If you would have said "some" I might agree with you but with such absolute statements that include "all" and "everyone else" I cannot

[elcorso]

But this does not stop,us from all feeling we are right and everyone else is wrong

 

I really don't care to be wrong (or right).

 

Life could be a competition for food, but never to enjoy (or not) through our senses, otherwise it would be narcissism.

 

Roch

[Allan F]

I really don't care to be wrong (or right).

 

Life could be a competition for food, but never to enjoy (or not) through our senses, otherwise it would be narcissism.

 

Roch

 

Or, possibly, masochism.

[SoundAndMotion]

I know of no measure of human characteristics or performance that does not show variability. Height, vision, fastest running speed, solving puzzles, and hearing, all show variablility. "Normal" is used to mean "within the normal range": a statistical statement. In my work on perception (psychophysics), there is variability in absolute thresholds and differential thresholds for amplitudes and each shows an individual frequency dependence. I haven't studied it yet myself, but I'm certain there is variability in differential thresholds for distortion. We all hear differently and it can be measured.

[mav52]

Do we all really hear the same ??? | General discussions and miscellaneous ramblings | Forums | PS Audio

 

hard to say. I see you have asked this same question on darn near every forum

[Jabs1542]

I believe that regarding audiophile hearing (critical listening) we ar all a little different. Each person's ear is physically different and each person's trained listening experience is different. I. The context of watching TV this difference doesn't matter, but when it comes to USB cables, high res, or many of the other topics we discuss it does matter.

 

I believe there are people on CA who have better ears than I do (physically) and can hear better than me (trained experience), I also believe there are those who hear worse than I do.

 

So do we really all hear the same? When watching TV or at a lecture - Yes. But when critically listening to a piece of music - Sometimes No.

[miguelito]

We do not hear the same, obviously. Do we all see the same? No.

[christopher3393]

If we are talking about the whole of any music listening experience, I wonder if I ever hear exactly the same thing twice. Much depends on qualifying what is meant by hearing and listening, and in this context what is usually under discussion is some scientific understanding with particular mathematical parameters and repeatability. This can have great value. My own interests are more in sharing what I've heard with another who has listened closely to the same music, preferably at the same time and place. I always learn from exchanges that I have with that fellow listener, sometimes because of the very differences in what/how we heard. But I don't think that this is what is being addressed here.

[gmgraves]

Do we all really hear the same ??? | General discussions and miscellaneous ramblings | Forums | PS Audio

 

 

We all "hear" the same (based on age and our individual aural backgrounds, of course - for instance, a 60 year-old who worked in a boiler factory all his life (or played in a rock band) is not going hear as well as a 20 year old girl who has never been exposed to high noise levels), but we don't all "listen" the same. For instance, I might hear things in a musical performance that you don't hear (and vice-versa) simply because I've trained myself to listen for those things. The myth of the "golden-eared audiophile" is not a myth. If you train yourself to listen for anomalies in audio playback, you are going to hear things in that playback that others might miss. Is your hearing better than theirs? From an audiometry standpoint maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. You are listening for things that others don't listen for and likely don't care about. That is what makes you a "golden-eared audiophile", not your audiometrist report.

[InfernoSTi]

I know of no measure of human characteristics or performance that does not show variability.

 

Mortality.

[tne]

Mortality.

 

 

You're quoting and replying to a spambot here, bruv.

 

But the statement is from SoundandMotion's earlier post.

[InfernoSTi]

You're quoting and replying to a spambot here, bruv.

 

But the statement is from SoundandMotion's earlier post.

 

Ah, the irony is great with this:

 

A spambot quotes about its knowledge of the human condition and I reply with the one constant of being human, mortality, only to find out I'm not replying to a human, making me hope for a quick death to the spambot.

 

Perfect.

[phusis]

It seems to me, or I'd have to guess the difference is more in how we describe our listening impressions, and what of the heard we ultimately prefer.

 

(making me think)

100 people attending the same classical concert may have slight deviations in their aural perception of it (also in regards to how they're seated), but the sonic origin (i.e. the concert) is still the same; even if they heard it differently they'd still end up trying to emulate the sound of that same concert through their home stereo, if they so chose to. Subjectivism to me is not trying to recreate a particular sonic imprinting differently, but that recreating it is not the goal.

[tne]

I found out that I was color blind when I was an undergrad and took the Ishihara test. Before that I had never had any thoughts about my color vision being different from that of others. Blue was blue (the sensory experience that I associated with the word "blue") and red was red, etc. My color vision has always seemed quite vivid to me. Except I could not read those f#cking numbers on many of the panels of that test.

 

As many here realize, color vision is mediated through three types of cones in the retina with peak response curves at the red, blue, and green energies. Genetic variation can tune these responses and in some individuals this leads to what is called color blindness (although blindness is not really an accurate term for this).

 

Perhaps there are similar phenomena in the auditory system that may lead to hearing differences between individuals. If someone with more extensive and up-to-date knowledge about audition could shed some light (er, I mean sound) on this, I would be very interested to be better informed in this area.

[bmwr75]

There is no way to know.

 

Roch

 

Sure there is a way to know quantitatively (but not qualitatively), all you have to do is test your hearing.

 

Hearing Test - Can You Hear This?

 

I can't hear anything above 12k Hz, but I'm 53 years old. Younger folks can usually hear up near 20k Hz.

 

The subjective part of hearing (qualitative) is a whole nother story that can be debated adnauseum.

[semente]

Perhaps we should evaluate performance with pink noise.

That would certainly remove our emotional response from the equation...

 

R

[miguelito]

That would be like evaluating your sight by looking at a Jackson Pollock! )))

[semente]

He, he... And some would probably prefer "warmer" pink while others might chose the noise that produced the widest and deepest soundstage.

Once an audiophile, always an audiophile...

[Jabs1542]

And then there's PCM pink versus DSD pink

[wakibaki]

I found out that I was color blind when I was an undergrad and took the Ishihara test. Before that I had never had any thoughts about my color vision being different from that of others. Blue was blue (the sensory experience that I associated with the word "blue") and red was red, etc. My color vision has always seemed quite vivid to me. Except I could not read those f#cking numbers on many of the panels of that test.

 

As many here realize, color vision is mediated through three types of cones in the retina with peak response curves at the red, blue, and green energies. Genetic variation can tune these responses and in some individuals this leads to what is called color blindness (although blindness is not really an accurate term for this).

 

Perhaps there are similar phenomena in the auditory system that may lead to hearing differences between individuals. If someone with more extensive and up-to-date knowledge about audition could shed some light (er, I mean sound) on this, I would be very interested to be better informed in this area.

 

OK, hearing covers a continuous spectrum in healthy individuals. It's thought to take advantage of the resonance of progressively smaller hairs in the ear. It could be discrete steps, but that's another argument.

 

Colour vision is a complex interpolation of the responses of the cones. Monochromatic light of a given frequency can be mimicked by mixed light of more than one frequency. A pure audible tone cannot be produced by mixing any number of pure tones.

 

You could have notches in your hearing (chunks missing in the sequence of hairs), but this is not really the same as having no blue cones. This could lead to your mistaking say, a saxophone for a clarinet in some ranges, but the colour eye is a construct of three wideband overlapping sensors, and the ear is a construct of many narrowband sensors. If the blue sensors are removed, the brain still has to interpret the red and green into a spectrum covering all the objects in the visual field, whereas if a single contiguous range of pitch perception equal to the fraction of the colour spectrum that blue represents is removed, this could result in the complete disappearance of some instruments from the perceived sound, e.g. the triangle.

[tne]

^

Color blindness does not involve the absence of one of the three types of cones, but a different response curve for one (or more).

In many cases this involves amino acid changes near the retinal chromophore of the cone which alters the sensitivity or energy spectrum to which it responds. This is not blindness but a change from the "normal" color vision. As you state, it is the "complex interpolation of the responses" that leads to our sensation of color.

 

I do not want to overdo the potential analogy with audition (since I have so little knowledge about how this works), but my main point earlier was that what each individual senses can have significant variation (of course we all know this). The potential impact on the topics that many of us on CA find interesting is an open question to me.