Klarinet Archive - Posting 000260.txt from 2005/04

From: Tony Pay <tony_pay@-----.uk>
Subj: Re: [kl] Test results format
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:54:30 -0400


--- Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net> wrote:
> Tony Pay wrote:
>
> > Still, Dan, if you´re willing, and when you have access, I´d like to
> > know the results in the form:
> >
> > Player 1: 4 said French, 2 said English, 1 said American, 1 said German
> > Player 2: 2 said French, 1 said English, 5 said American, 0 said German
> >
> > ...and so on.
>
> I think you need more than that: you need to know each respondent's
> individual answers. Then you can test for the correlations I mentioned
> earlier.
>
> Probably the best thing is for Dan to prepare an Excel spreadsheet (or
> similar) of all the data.

If he would be willing to do that, it would obviously include the information I
wanted.

I think it's pretty clear that you can't tell the nationality of a clarinet
player from his playing. But that doesn't mean that there aren't the corpses
of once nationally meaningful categories still hanging about.

I suspect that quite a few of the older people here have, like me, prototypical
'French', 'German' and 'English' clarinet sounds in their minds, drawn probably
from old recordings or performances by people like Delecluse, Cahuzac, Geuser,
Wlach (Viennese), Draper, Thurston and then Brymer, Walton and de Peyer. Those
people would be unable to tell the nationality of the player of a recent
recording, but they might want to say paradoxically of someone like Paul Meyer,
well, he's French, but he doesn't *sound* French.

Because I find I want to say that myself, I think these categories have some
independent reality, though to continue to attach them to nationalities is
probably counterproductive.

How categories are constructed, and how they aren't in general analysable by
looking for defining characteristics, is quite a fascinating one to follow up.
It turns out to be far from simple. I recommend the book, "Women, Fire and
Dangerous Things: what categories tell us about the human mind" by George
Lakoff.

Lakoff also wrote "Metaphors we Live By" with Mark Johnson, and more recently
"Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives think", and "Don't Think of an
Elephant!"

(BTW Joe, I've tried to email you from a yahoo account, because I'm away, but
it bounces, don't know why. So just to say quickly that that's why I don't ATM
have access to your helpful motion-capture email, because I got it on my home
machine before setting up the forwarding system.)

Tony

Please reply to tony.p@-----.

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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