Klarinet Archive - Posting 001062.txt from 2000/05

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Tone -- online experiment
Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 12:43:58 -0400

Tony Pay wrote,
>Anyhow, it's a common error to suppose that the collection of data leads
>to deeper insight. But you need a clear theory to test before data is
>any use to you.
>I think this experiment would be useless. (No offence meant, Bill.)

Bill Wright wrote,
>> None taken. I abandoned the idea a few days ago myself.
>snip>
>> My principle reason for abandoning the experiment was my new
>>awareness of how often a good musician changes his or her tone during a
>>single piece or even during a single measure. Perhaps (probably?) a
>>large group of musicians would agree substantially (but not 100%) on
>>whether a particular steady tone with no other sound to provide context
>>was 'dark' or 'bright', but that's not what music is.

As I understood the original idea, Bill's experiment wasn't meant to decide
whether dark tone is *good or bad*, but simply to define what the word
*means*. That, it seems to me, would still be a useful thing to do, since so
many of us want to use the word (despite the bickering about it). However, I
think that particular experiment probably was doomed, because there's no
practical way to make sure all of us hear the same sample of sounds. We've
all got different speakers, different rooms, different tastes in how we've
set up the equipment, etc.. I think an easier place to do the preliminary
work on defining "dark" would be in a music school or at that clarinet
festival a lot of you attend. Put as many clarinet players together in one
room as possible, pass around ballots, and play snippets of recordings, as
"sample 1," "sample 2" and so forth. Ask the clarinetists to mark ballots
for each sample, and keep things simple:

The clarinetist's tone in this passage is:
___ Very dark
___ Dark
___ Somewhat dark
___ Medium, neither dark nor bright
___ Somewhat bright
___ Bright
___ Very bright

(I suggest verbal descriptions because, in my Cretaceous Era college psych
classes, when experimenters asked subjects to use a numerical scale -- which,
in this case, would be perhaps 1 for the darkest and 7 for the least dark --
a substantial number of people subsequently believed we'd goofed up and used
the scale backwards part of the time.) That experiment might at least
indicate whether or not there's any consensus -- whether a majority of us use
the word to describe the same type of sound. If there's a consensus, *then*
participants could talk about what the sounds described as "dark" have in
common with each other and how they differ from the sounds described as
"bright," and arrive at a definition that way. If there's no consensus, then
the words "dark" and "bright" won't work to describe tone, unless and until
someone authoritatively defines it and somehow enforces the definition,
perhaps by seeking out offenders and breaking all our reeds. If there is a
consensus, then I'd be most curious to hear about it.

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I used to have an open mind but my brains kept falling out.

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