Klarinet Archive - Posting 000449.txt from 2001/02

From: Bilwright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: Re: [kl] Re: strange intonation in warm up exercise
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 11:58:53 -0500

<><> Bill Hausmann wrote:
OK. Then why do the walls of the church shake when you add the Resultant
Bass stop? That is not from my ears or brain. That is a physical
phenomenon.

Our sense of hearing is a physical phenomenon also --- namely,
vibration of the bones & membranes in our ear, the stretch sensors in
our ear that translate vibration into electrical discharges in the
nerves, the processing that happens deeper in our cortex, and so forth.
Certainly you can measure all of these things, and therefore they exist
in a physical sense.

But this doesn't affect the point under discussion --- namely, that
the two materials (wall vs. ear/neural tissue) may respond in different
ways to the air's vibration.

I am _not_ saying that the original acoustic wave lacks the
information that causes us (and a tuner and the walls) to 'hear'
difference tones.
What I _am_ saying --- harking back to the comment that began this
thread --- is that a tuner probably responds to a different subset of
the information in an acoustic wave than the human ear does. Also, the
tuner probably translates whatever part of the wave that it 'pays
attention to' in a different way than neural tissue does. Therefore
our perception of a difference tone is completely different from what a
tuner perceives.
In the above sense only, a 'difference tone' is manufactured inside
our nervous system, not outside of it (IMO, of course).

Cheers,
Bill

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