Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning Why do people like Aaron waste their time with pseudoscience?

Aaron K. Johnson asked:

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From: "Aaron K. Johnson" <akjmicro@c...>
Date: Sun Apr 11, 2004 5:33 am
Subject: Re: [metatuning] The usual rebuttal

>I'm wondering what you think of the Benade (I hope I'm spelling that
right)
>'special relationship' experiment with JI, where the subjects
apparantly found
>2/1, 3/2, 5/4, 7/4, etc by tuning oscillators?

"Problems In Pseudoscientific Thinking
"4. Anecdotes Do Not Make A Science
"Anecdotes -- stories recounted in support of a claim -- do make
a science. Without corroborative evidence from other sources,
or physical proof of some sort, ten anecdotes are no better than
one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than one, and a
hundred anecdotes are not better than ten. Anecdotes are told by
fallible human storytellers. Farmer Bob in Puckerbrush, Kansas,
may be an honest, church-going family man not obviously
subject to delusions, but we need physical evidence of an
alien spacecraft or alien bodies, not just a story about landings
and abductions at 3:00 A.M. on a deserted country road." [Shermer,
Michael, "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience,
Superstition, and Other Confusions Of Our Time," W. H. Freeman
and Company: New York, 1997, pp. 48]

Arthur Benade's story about students listening for `special
relationships' with a variable oscillator was an anecdote,
not a scientific experiment. It appears in Benade's text
on acoustics as a "just-so" story.

The reason Aaron K. Johnson cites Benade's anecdote is
that Aaron K. Johnson is reading from David Doty's "Just
Intonation Primer" and David Doty cites this anecdote
by Benade as the sole supporting piece of experimental
evidence in favor of 5-limit just intonation.

The reason why David Doty cites only this one anecdotal
"just so" story by Arthur Benade as the sole supporting
piece of experimental evidence in favor of 5-limit just
intonation is that David Doty could not find any
evidence in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
on psychoacoustics to support Doty's claims about
5-limit just intonation. There is no evidence in
the peer-reviewed scientific literature on
psychoacoustics to support claims about a "special
relationship" produced by small integer ratios.
As a result, David Doty found himself forced to
fall back on this anecdote by Arthur Benade -- an
anecdote which was never published in a peer-
reviewed scientific journal.

The reason why Arthur Benade never published in
a peer-reviewed scientific journal his findings
about "special relationships" among small integer
ratios and sustained tones is simple.

Arthur Benade's claim about "special relationships"
where subjects apparantly found 2/1, 3/2, 5/4, 7/4,
etc by tuning oscillators did not get published
in a peer-reviewed scientific journal because
Benade couldn't get his findings published
in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Benade didn't get his findings about "special
relationships" published in a peer-reviewed
scientific journal because Benade's claims
fail to meet the most basic criteria of a
scientific experiment, and they are also
contradicted by a wealth of other genuine
psychoacoustics experiments that did get
published in peer-reviewed scientific
journals. As a result Benade's anecdote
would have been rejected by a peer-reviewed
pscyoacoustics journal in a hot minute.
This explains why he published his anecdote
only in a textbook on acoustics, not in
a psychouastics journal.

Benade's "special relationships" test does
not qualify as a scientific experiment
because it does not include a control group,
the findings were never statistically analyzed,
Benade made no apparent serious effort to
falsify his hypothesis, his test subjects
were drawn from an intensely biased subgroup,
there was no apparent experimental design
to avoid problems of intrasubject and
intersubject variability, no effort was made
to use either slightly or significantly
inharmonic sustained tones, no precautions
seem to have been taken to avoid external cues
or other forms of cheating, and last but
not least, the test boils down to nothing
but a measure of the degree to which students
had been indoctrinated with the beliefs
which Benade fed them -- which is to
say that Benade made no effort to
ascertain whether, even if his findings
had been valid, they were due to nature
or nurture.

I will now explain each of these failures
in Benade's ancedotal just-so story and
detail the specific reasons why Benade's
ancedote about the "special relationships"
test does not qualify as a scientific
experiment and would have been rejected
by any peer-reviewed scientific journal
on psychoacoustics or cognitve psychology.

Problem 1: Like the group of people who
give testimonials for the magical magnetic
pain-relieving q-ray bracelet, Arthur
Benade's test subjects did not include
a control group. In late-nite informercials
we hear plenty of "just-so" stories about
how the magical magnetic q-ray bracelet
relieves pain, but we never hear from
a control group -- that is to say, we
never hear from a group of people who
tried the magical magnetic q-ray bracelet
and did not experience a reduction in pain.
The reason why we don't hear from a control
group in the late-night magnetic pain
bracelet infomercials is simple -- because
we would then discover that some people
found the magnetic pain-relieving bracelet
seemed to erelieve their pain but many
other people would testify that the
magical magnetic pain-relievigin q-ray
bracelet did nothing at all, and this
woudl give the wrong (read: true)
impression. Likewise, Arthur Benade
never took small children too young
to have been brainwashed by Western
music thoery; Benade never used that
group for the hearing test with his
variable oscillator.
It transpires that other psychoacoustics
researchers did take small children too
young to have been brainwashed by
Western music theory and they did
perform variable-oscillator tests
of the kind Benade describes. They
also performed fixed-oscillator tests
with questions about the perceived
musical consonance of the intervals.

"In a laboratory study, Van de Geer
et al, (1962) found that intervals
judged the most consonant by laymen
do not correspond to the group usually
termed consonant. This result is
elaborated by recent work by Fuda and
Wessel (1977)." [Risset, Jean-Claude,
"Musical Acoustics," Rapports IRCAM,
1978, pp. 7-8]

By using proper control groups, Van
de Geer & Levelt & Plomp (1962) and
Fuda & Wessel (1977) eliminated the
obvious problem we see from a biased
population in the late-nite magnetic
pain-relieving bracelet infomercials.
In a properly conducted scientific
experiment with an adequate control
group, the result is that both the
claims about the magnetic pain-
relieving bracelet and Benade's
claims about "special relationships"
collapse.

Notice that it is unnecessary to
conduct further psychoacoustic
experiments along these lines,
since multiple experiments have
already been conducted and the
findings have been replicated
and published in the peer-reviewed
scientific literature. To a
scientist, that's the end of
the story. Case closed. Of
course, to the pseudoscientists
like Paul "All Numerology, No
Scientific Method" Erlich and
Gene "Woolly-Headed Numerology"
Smith and Carl "Infinite
Gullibility" Lumma who dominate
the Alternative Wanking List,
such published scientific
results are doubtless not
sufficient. Without question
these masterminds will tell us
that we need _more_ scientific
testing to be sure -- just
as the proponents of cold
fusion assure us that we
need "more testing" to clarify
matters, and just as the
advocates of pyramid power
will tell us "the matter is
not settled and needs to be
looked into further in more
experiments." Standard operating
procedure for pseudoscientists.

REFERENCES:
Risset, Jean-Claude, "Musical
Acoustics," Rapports IRCAM,
1978, pp. 7-8.
Warren, R., "Auditory Perception:
A New Synthesis," McMillan
& Co.: New York, 1985, pg. 74
Pikler, A. G. "History Of Experiments
On the Musical Sense," J. Mus. Theory,
Vol. 10, 1967
Plomp, R. and Levelt W. J. M.,
"Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth,"
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 35, 1965,
pp. 548-560
Shermer, Michael, "Why People Believe
Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition,
and other Confusions Of Our Time, W. H.
Freeman and Company: New York, 1997
Benade, Arthur, The Foundations Of
Musical Acoustics, London and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976
Cohen, Elizabeth, "Fusion and
Cazden, Norman, "The Defnition of
Consonacne and Dissonance," International
Review of Aesthetics and Sociology
in Music, 1980, Vol. 11, No. 2,
pp. 123-168

Problem 2: Beande's findings were
never statistically analyzed.
This is basic to any valid
scientific experiment. There
will always be anomalous data
points and some range of variation
in the results. A reputable scientist
wishes to know: how many of the data
points are anomalous? How often do
they show up? How large is the range
of variation in the experimental
results? If the range of variation
is large enough, it can cast doubt
on the experimental findings. Likewise,
if there are too many anomalous data
points, or if the person performing
the experiment found himself forced to
throw out an excessive number of bad
data points, we want to know this because
it could seriously compromise the
credibility of the experiment.
Michael Shermer gives an example of
how the failure to statistically
analyze the results of an experiment
lead to pseudoscience:

In a test for ESP using an ESP-testing
machine with 5 possible answers (plus,
square, star, circle, wavy lines) at the
Edgar Cayce Association For Research and
Enlightenment "the instructor explained
that `5 right [out of 25 trials] is
average, chance is between 3 and 7,
and anything above 7 is evidence for
ESP.' (..) I then surveyed the group.
In the first set [of 25 trials], three
people got 2 right, while another three
got 8 right; in the second set, one
even got 9 right. So, while I apparently
did not have psychic power, at least
four other people did. Or did they?
"Before concluding that high scores
indicate a high degree of ESP
ability, you have to know what
kind of scores people would get merely
by chance. The scores expected by chance
can be predicted by probability theory
and statistical analysis. Scientists
use comparison ebtween statistically
produced test results and actual test
results to determine whether results
are significant, that is, better than
what would be expected by chance. The
ESP test results clearly matched the
expected pattern for random results.
"I explained to the group `In the
first set [of 25 trials], three got
2, three got 8, and everyone else
(twenty-nine people) scored between
3 and 7. In the second set, there was
one 9, two 2s and one 1, _all scored by
different people than those who scored
high and low in the first test!_ Doesn't
that sound like a normal distribution
around an average of 5?' (..)
"On a piece of scrap paper, I drew a
crude version of the normal frequency
curve, more commonly known as the bell
curve (see figure 6), explained that
the mean, or average number, of correct
responses (`hits') is expected by chance
to be 5 (5 out of 25). The amount that
the number of hits will deviate from the
standard mean of 5 by chance, is 2. Thus,
for a group this size, we should not put
any secial signifiance on the fact that
someone scored only 1 or 2 correct hits.
This is exactly what is expected to
happen by chance.
"So these test results suggest that
nothing other than chance was operating.
The deviation from the mean for this
experiment was nothing more than what
we would expect." [Shermer, Michael,
"Why People Believe Weird Things:
Pseudoscience, Superstition, and other
Confusions Of Our Time," W. H. Freeman
and Company: New York, 1997, pp. 69-70]

In Arthur Benade's test we should like
to have the actual data. But Benade
did not give the actual data in his
ancedotal account of the test, nor
did he offer any statistical analysis --
Benade merely summarizing the results
of his test. That is suspciiously similar
to the ESP tests performed at the Edgar
Cayce Institute, and countless other
factories of junkthink and pseudoscience.

Problem 3: Benade made no apparent
serious attempt to falsify his hypothesis.
Common sense tells us you need to do more
than search for confirming evidence.
This could easily and simply have been
done. Benade could have run one set of
tests using oscillators an harmonic
serise timbre. Then Benade could have
run another series of tests using
oscillators set to inharmonic
relationships. If the test subjects
in the second set of tests still find
the "special relationships" even with
an inharmonic timbre, then we would
be justified in concluding that
Benade's "special relationships" are
indeed genetically engraved into the
human auditory system. If, however,
the "special relationships" do not
show up in the second set of tests
which use an inharmonic timbre, then
we may justifiably conclude that
the Benade's test subjects were
not detecting small integer ratios
at all. Instead, all Benade's test
subject were doing was detecting
whether the partials line up.

As it happens, these experiments
have been performed, and they
prove conclusively that listeners
cannot detect small integer ratios
in the absence of auditory cues
from the lining-up of partials.

"Helmholtz (1867) links the degree
of dissonance to the audibility of
beats between the partials of the
tones. This theory is hardly tenable
becaus the patternof beats for a given
interval depends very much on the
placement of the interval within
the auditory frequency range. Recent
observations (Plomp, 1966) suggest an
improved physical explanation of
consonance: listeners find that
the dissonance of a pair of tones
is at a maximum when the partials
are about a quarter of a critical
bandwidth apart: the tones are
judged consonant when the partials
are more than a critical bandwidth
apart." [Risset, Jean-Claude,
"Musical Acoustics," Rapports IRCAM,
1978, pp. 7-8]

REFERENCES:

Pierce, J. R. and Mathews, M., "Control
Of Consonance and Dissonance With
Nonharmonic Overtones," in Computers and
Music, ed. Heinz von Foerster and James
W. Beauchamp, John Wiley and Sons: New
York, 1969, pp. 129-132
Risset, Jean-Claude, "Musical Acoustics,"
Rapports IRCAM, 1978, pp. 7-8
Plomp, R. and Levelt W. J. M.,
"Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth,"
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 35, 1965,
pp. 548-560
Slaymaker, F., "Chords From Tones Having
Stretched Partials," J. Acoust. Soc.
Am., Vol. 47, 1971, pp. 1369-1371
Moran, H. and Pratt, C. C., "Variability
In Judgments Of Musical Intervals," J.
Exp. Psych., Vol. 9, 1926
Sethares, W., "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum,
Scale," Wiley & Sons: New York, 1997

Problem 4: Benade's subjects were drawn
from an intensely biased subgroup. The
people Benade tested were students whom
he had spoon-fed his speculations about
musical consonance and the harmonic
series. When different non-biased
populations are tested, they hear
different relationships among both
harmonic series and inharmonic series
tones (see Van de Geer and Plomp and
Mimpen, above).
How representative are Benade's students
of the general musical population? Did
the degree to which Benade conditioned
his subjects by extensively lecturing
on "special relationships" twixt integer
ratio tones have any effect on their
test results?

"We must always remmember the larger
context in which a seemingly unusual
event occurs, and we must always analyze
unusual events for their representativeness
of thei class of phenomena. In this case
of the `Bermuda Triangle,' an area of the
Atlantic Ocean where ships and planes
`mysteriously' disappear, ther eis the
assumption that osmething strange or alien
is at work. But we must consider how
representative such events are in that
area. Far more shipping lanes run through
the Bermuda Triangle than in surrounding
areas, so accidents and mishaps and
disappearnces are more liley to happen
in the area." [Shermer, Michael,
"Why People Believe Weird Things:
Pseudoscience, Superstition, and other
Confusions Of Our Time," W. H. Freeman
and Company: New York, 1997, pp. 54-55]

Problem 5: There was no apparent experimental
design to avoid problems of intrasubject and
intersubject variability. An experiment
must be carefully designed and the possible
outcomes analyzed beforehand using statistical
methods to make sure that unusual data
points are not the result of pure chance,
or subjects who give an unusually wide range
of variable response. Benade never tells us
the confidence intervals for his test, nor
does he give us the raw data, nor does he
specify the results of a Students T-distribution
or a chi square test on his test results.
Instead, Benade merely gies us an unsupported
ancedote sans data, sans analysis.

Problem 6: no effort was made to use either
slightly or significantly inharmonic sustained
tones. By designing an experiment in which
slightly inharmonic tones are contrasted
with perfectly harmonic tones using chorus
effects, it can be determined whether
perception of smoothness is the product
of Benade's claimed "special relationships"
between small integers, or whether the
perceived smoothness results from a
mere lack of beats. As it happens, this
experiment has been performed. In his
PhD thesis the current editor of the
Computer Music Journal, Douglas Keislar,
found no special relationship between
small integers.

REFERENCES:
Keislar, Douglas, Psychoacoustic Factors
In Musical Intonation: Beats, Interval
Tuning, and Inharmonicity. PhD thesis,
Stanford University, Department of Music
Technical Report STAN M-70, March 1991.

Problem 7: no precautions seem to have
been taken to avoid external cues or
other forms of cheating. The most
obvoius external cue here is the
degree of rotation of the dial or
te length of travel of a slider used
to control the variable oscillator.
J. B. Rhine and other psychic researchers
neglected to account for these kinds
of external cues, and as a result their
ESP experiments prdouced tainted results
and proved worthless.

Problem 8: the test boils down to nothing
but a measure of the degree to which students
had been indoctrinated with the beliefs
which Benade fed them.
Music students tested with tones whose
timbres are harmonic but which exhibit
a different distribution of overtone
amplitudes than benade used are likely
to give different responses than Benade's
test subjects:

"As an application of the consoanne theory,
effects of hamronic structure onm the c
sonconance chacteristics are discussed.
(..) It became claer that the fifth
was not always a consonant interval. A
chord of two tones that consists of only
odd harmonic , for example, shows much
worse consonance at the fifth (2:3)
than t athe major sixth (3:5) or some
other frequency ratios. This was proved
true by psychological exeriemnts carried out in
another institute (sensory Inspection
Committee in th Japan Union of Scientists
and Engineers) with a different method
of scaling. Thus, the facts warns against
making a mistake in applying the conventional
theory of harmony to synthesi musical
tones that can take variety in the
harmonic structure." [Kameoka, A.
and Kuriyagawa, M., Consonance Theory
Part II: Consonance Of Complex Tones
And Its Calculation Method," J. Acoust.
Am., Vol. 45, No. 6, 1969, pg. 480]

When people who are not indoctrinated in
a belief system get tested objectively in
a repeatable scientific experiment, the
results may (and often do) fail to support
the system of indoctrination. As a result
those who indoctrinate others with
a belief system, as Benade did to
his students, typically prefer only to
perform tests on the students they
have indoctrinated. This creates a
feedback loop in whihc indosctrination
creates a belief system which, when tested,
confirms the belief system -- and hte results
of the test are then used as the basis for
further indoctrination, which in turns
strengthens the belief system...and so on.
We see this kind of feedback loop, in which
indoctrination produces bias which when tested
confirms the bias and leads to more alleged
support for the indoctrination, most clearly
in the recent "repressed memory" craze:

"The feedback loop for the movement
now bean to self-organize, encouranged
by psychotherapist Jeffrey Masson's
1984 book The Assault On Truth, in
which he rejected Freud's claim that
childhood sexual abuse was fantasy
and argued that Freud's initial position --
that hte sexual abuse so often recounted
by his pateints was actual, rampant, and
responsible for adult women's neuroses --
was the correct one. The movement became
a full-blwon with craze when Ellen Bass and
Laura Davis published The Courage To Heal:
A Guide For Women Survivors Of Child
Sexual Abus in 1988. One of its conclusions
was `If you think you were abused and your
life shows the symptoms, then you were' (pg.
12). The Book sold more than 750,000 copies
and triggered a recovered memory industry
that involved dozens of simliar books,
talk-show programs, and magazine and
newspaper stories." [Shermer, Michael,
"Why People Believe Weird Things:
Pseudoscience, Superstition, and other
Confusions Of Our Time," W. H. Freeman
and Company: New York, 1997, pp. 109]

REfERENCES:
Cohen, Elizabeth, "Fusion and
Consoannce Relations For Inharmonic
Tones," J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol.
65, S123, 1980
Kameoka, A., and Kuriyagawa, M.,
Consonance Theory Part II: Consonance
Of Complex Tones And Its Calculation Method,"
J. Acoust. Am., Vol. 45, No. 6, 1969, pg. 480
Risset, Jean-Claude, "Musical Acoustics,"
Rapports IRCAM, 1978, pp. 7-8
Plomp, R. and Levelt W. J. M.,
"Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth,"
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 35, 1965,
pp. 548-560
Shermer, Michael, "Why People Believe Weird
Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and
other Confusions Of Our Time," W. H. Freeman
and Company: New York, 1997

--------------------------------

If Aaron Johnson had read my book "Microtonality:
Past, Present and Future," he would have found
the following paragraph on page 42:

"Benade (1975) cannot excuse the lapses in his 1975
text Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics on the
basis of bad timing. In the period between the
late 60s early 1970s much of the data cited
throughout this article was already well known;
Benade chooses not only to ignore it, but
actually to argue with a number of independently-
confirmed results..." [mclaren, B., "Microtonality
and Psychoacoustics," in Microtonality: Past,
Present and Future, 1999]

Evidently Aaron Johnson simply chose not to
read my scholarship.

As Isaac Asimov remarked, "We skeptics have
nothing to offer but the dry facts. Hucksters
and charlatans offer the public a world full
of magic and wonder and mystery. People dislike
dry facts. So they run toward the astrologers
and the UFO cults."

To this I would add the fact that human
creativity and our capacity to respond
emotionally to music is truly magical
and genuinely wondrous and deeply
mysterious. So to my mind the real
question is why people run away from
the genuine magic in the world (human
creativity) and toward the phoney
magic purveyed by numerologists and
astrologers and bogus swamis who
spout scientific-sounidng gobbledygook?

Bill Wesley and I have often discussed
this. Why do people like Joe Monzo waste
years on their lives putting intense
effort into vacuous pseudoscience like
claculations involving ratios-space lattices,
when with the same amount of effort a
person like Monzo could earn a degreee
in the sciences and actually wind up
knowing something rather than getting
a head full of tommyrot?
Why do people like Aaron Johnson piss
away years of their lives debating
pseudoscientific twaddle like vals
or harmonic entropy, when with less effort
they could go to the nearest university
library and do serious scholarship...thereby
gaining valid kowledge?

---------
--mclaren

Why do people like Aaron waste their time with pseudoscience?

🔗xenharmonic <xed@...>

🔗monz <monz@...>

🔗monz <monz@...>

🔗Aaron K. Johnson <akjmicro@...>

🔗Kurt Bigler <kkb@...>