*Angular pitch patterns don't sound like melodies unless it's Prokofiev :) So happy to have you back on RU-vid Dr. Pinker. Your work has been a huge influence on my life and thinking. Thanks for everything you do. Are you a musician yourself? We are a woefully unscientific bunch and I've found your work extremely helpful to understanding the underlying brain processes.
I was fortunate to be in Al's cognitive psych class the year before you ('74-'75), and it was a powerful influence on my thinking. While I did not stumble onto Auditory Scene Analysis, formally, until some years later, Al certainly piqued my interest in deconstructing why things sound the way they do, for many years thereafter. I still maintain an interest in musical equipment design, as well as explaining to the younger set how their perception of musical sounds and effects works, often from an attentional perspective. The connection between human development and how our hearing works is often underappreciated, as is the connection between instrument design and neuropsychology. Ever stop to ask yourself just why note pitch gets higher on a keyboard from left to right, when it could have gone in the other direction? And why do so many popular musicians insist on use of distortion, achieving the same sort of raspiness that parents identify as "urgency" in an infant cry? And is there a connection between the Fletcher-Munson equal-loudness curves, what foetuses can hear in the womb, and what newborns attend to preferentially in their sonic world? What makes an "ideal" mix in a musical recording, resulting in the least listener fatigue? What do musicians mean when they talk about an instrument or musician "cutting through", and what allows that instrument or musician to do so? In the early 1980s, perceptual psychology provided insights into developing better musical reproduction technology. One such example was the "image enhancers" available at the time. These electronic devices employed our knowledge about what is different about the sound going to each ear when the source is not directly in front (AKA "off-axis"), and used that to strategically manipulate the sound signal in a manner to make multiple instruments more locatable in space (or rather, *sound* that way), and make the soundstage seem much bigger. Such devices came from research into, and understanding of, how we make sense of the auditory world, and scene analysis.
Some of us have Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) and cannot tell sounds apart. Most of what's being talked about in the video feels alien to me. Because if there's a slight background noise in the environment then I can no longer understand what anyone is saying.
