Klarinet Archive - Posting 000133.txt from 2005/03

From: ormo2ndtoby@-----.net (Ormondtoby Montoya)
Subj: RE: [kl] German sound
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 14:31:15 -0500

...and "sound" depends on both the listener and context as well.

Pitch perception can be influenced by sounds you heard just a moment
earlier. So can timbre perception.

On the larger scale of culture and education, I remember reading a
chapter about phoneme perception. The test subject was asked to listen
to a series of phonemes. The list included an occasional phoneme that
was not part of the subject's language. ("L" for Japanese speakers was
one of them.) Some subjects misidentified the 'foreign' phonemes,
claiming that they were other phonemes which *were* used in the
subject's language. In one case, the subject simply didn't hear the
phoneme when it was pronounced. Rather, the subject declared that
there had been a silence.

The only objective analysis would be an audio spectrograph; but even in
this case, do you measure the sound waves while the wave is travelling
through the air, or do you measure what's bouncing around in the
listener's ear canal (which varies with the listener's anatomy)? And
even if you agree to measure the wave as it approaches the listener, the
graphs are too complex for anyone to unravel (so far, at least).

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