Klarinet Archive - Posting 001036.txt from 2000/07

From: Bilwright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: Re: [kl] Listening for what's wrong
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 21:09:34 -0400

<><> Lelia Loban wrote:
But seriously, what is it about the act of playing that makes us imagine
it sounds better when we're doing it than it sounds when we listen to
the tape later?

....I don't mean this as a joke (not completely at least), but most
of us don't have a first class recording setup. So to some extent, we
can blame it on the recorder and speakers.
Also, what the player hears is not what the audience hears -- bone
conduction, etc.

Perhaps I've read too much neurology, but above all else, I think
that anyone who pays attention to neurology has to accept the fact that
the human brain cannot and does not process and/or remember the entirety
of a stimulus -- regardless of whether the stimulus is aural, visual,
tactile, urgent or relaxed, related to survival or not, etc. The result
is that every perception is an 'image', an extraction of details --
something less than the entire stimulus, but nevertheless something that
hopefully will summarize the stimulus in a useful manner.
This is why (usually) we hear the same pitch regardless of which
partials have been filtered out. We're not really hearing the entire
thing. Rather, we're picking out the details that will help us cope
(with variation between backgrounds, instruments, room acoustics, and so
forth)
So what has this to do with "hearing yourself honestly"? Two
things:

First, your mind automatically dismisses the details that "don't
count" -- such as the little squeak or the spluttering from saliva in
the hole or the unintended fermata or whatever. This is what your mind
was built to do in the first place.
And this brings us to the second thing..... context. If your mind
is going to ignore things that "don't count", how will it choose which
things to ignore? Context. Listening to yourself is a totally
different context than listening to a recording. Essentially 'context'
means that certain neural pathways are already partially activated and
more ready to fire. When you're playing, the circuits that you consider
'best for this purpose' are already activated and ready to respond.
The thesis of Descartes' Error -- and I apologize for mentioning
this book so often, but it _really_ does have something to say about our
brains -- is that we cannot 'think' or 'reason' without using the same
neural structures that deliver our perceptions to our brains for
processing and that carry our outputs back to our hands, limbs, lips,
etc. These circuits are not isolated from each other. They crosstalk
with each other and they prepare each other to fire. So if these
structures are primed to fire (as when you want to produce a certain
sound), then they are also primed to 'hear' the same sound. When you're
listening to a tape, you aren't primed in this manner. You are critic,
not player. Another way of saying the same thing: You are listening,
not imagining.

At least, that's how I see it. (...and since when did anyone
'see' an idea, eh?)

Cheers,
Bill

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe from Klarinet, e-mail: klarinet-unsubscribe@-----.org
Subscribe to the Digest: klarinet-digest-subscribe@-----.org
Additional commands: klarinet-help@-----.org
Other problems: klarinet-owner@-----.org