What are fields of attraction

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 7:55 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> >
> > OK, so you've said to interpret the phrase "fields of
> > attraction" as being completely psychoacoustics-agnostic and
> > referring entirely to people's preferences.
>
> Not necc. preferences.

What the frig? Did you not just say here

> > OK, I'll rephrase: you've taken psychoustics out of it, and
> > you're simply stating that people have preferences for simple
> > ratios, and that this has been observed by watching people
> > retune intervals and measuring the points they consider to be
> > maximally in tune. Correct?
> > So when you talk about fields of attraction, you're talking
> > about fields of people's preferences, not any specific
> > psychoacoustic phenomenon in particular. Correct?
>
> Now that I've taken out a life insurance policy... yes.

If it's not preferences, then what is it? Well, I'd assume
psychoacoustics, but you said it has nothing to do with
psychoacoustics. But you just now said

> Tuning a unison by elimination of beats is something almost
> anyone can do. Who are these many people who can't? -C.

So now fields of attraction have to do with beatlessness, but not
psychoacoustics?

Also, you've also said that they're not subjected to conditioning by
any means anyone can do while leading a normal life

> > Well, I don't buy the whole "field of attraction" thing, that's
> > all learning and conditioning.
> Actually it's not. And it can't be conditioned, at least
> not by any means anyone can do while leading a normal life.

But also, they're not listener-independent

> I try to write carefully to avoid this kind of thing.
> Did I say they were listener-independent? No! The fields
> of attraction for different listeners are correlated --
> namely, around 5- and 7-limit JI dyads.

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????//////////////slashslash///

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 7:55 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > OK, so you've said to interpret the phrase "fields of
> > > attraction" as being completely psychoacoustics-agnostic and
> > > referring entirely to people's preferences.
> >
> > Not necc. preferences.
>
> What the frig? Did you not just say here
>
> > > OK, I'll rephrase: you've taken psychoustics out of it, and
> > > you're simply stating that people have preferences for simple
> > > ratios, and that this has been observed by watching people
> > > retune intervals and measuring the points they consider to be
> > > maximally in tune. Correct?
> > > So when you talk about fields of attraction, you're talking
> > > about fields of people's preferences, not any specific
> > > psychoacoustic phenomenon in particular. Correct?
> >
> > Now that I've taken out a life insurance policy... yes.

I knew I'd need that policy!

> If it's not preferences, then what is it?

What Keenan called a good operating definition.

> > Tuning a unison by elimination of beats is something almost
> > anyone can do. Who are these many people who can't? -C.
>
> So now fields of attraction have to do with beatlessness, but
> not psychoacoustics?

That's from a different subthread.

I think we should let it rest.

-Carl

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 8:26 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > If it's not preferences, then what is it?
>
> What Keenan called a good operating definition.

It sounds like Keenan's definition could include categorical
perception effects, because it would include people claiming that 7/4
sounded too flat at first, because they were used to 12-EDO. Which is
fine, but if you're going to claim that fields of attraction can't be
conditioned by learning, the definition can't include categorical
perception effects.

> > > Tuning a unison by elimination of beats is something almost
> > > anyone can do. Who are these many people who can't? -C.
> >
> > So now fields of attraction have to do with beatlessness, but
> > not psychoacoustics?
>
> That's from a different subthread.
>
> I think we should let it rest.

There's still one (two-part) thing I want to know from you before I
let anything rest.

I get that your "fields of attraction" have to do with people tuning
things by ear until they subjectively say that they're maximally "in
tune." And I also get that you claim that they can't be changed via
any training that anyone can engage in while living a normal life.

So all I would like to know is
1) if you claim that the list consensus is that these fields of
attraction predict what intervals people will find to be the most
pleasurable.
2) if you claim that the list consensus is that the reliability of
this prediction doesn't change with musical training.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > > If it's not preferences, then what is it?
> >
> > What Keenan called a good operating definition.
>
> It sounds like Keenan's definition could include categorical
> perception effects, because it would include people claiming
> that 7/4 sounded too flat at first,

I didn't think his definition cared what people thought,
only what they tuned to. You can easily tune a 7/4 and
complain it came out too flat -- I did it many times when
I first found out about just intonation!

A barbershop singer once told me his quartet worked on a
show with a conductor who had AP. The conductor was
apparently driven to distraction by the sense that his
quartet was both in tune and out of tune at the same time.
(This is a bit apocryphal, sorry... I can't recall if I
heard this story in person at Harmony College in 1997, or
read it on a b-shop mailing list.)

> I get that your "fields of attraction" have to do with people
> tuning things by ear until they subjectively say that they're
> maximally "in tune." And I also get that you claim that they
> can't be changed via any training that anyone can engage in
> while living a normal life.

The edges might move around, but 21:16 is not going to be
rated more "in tune" than 3:2. Green will not turn to red.

> So all I would like to know is
> 1) if you claim that the list consensus is that these fields of
> attraction predict what intervals people will find to be the most
> pleasurable.

No.

> 2) if you claim that the list consensus is that the reliability
> of this prediction doesn't change with musical training.

See above.

-Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Carl Lumma" <carl@...> wrote:

> A barbershop singer once told me his quartet worked on a
> show with a conductor who had AP. The conductor was
> apparently driven to distraction by the sense that his
> quartet was both in tune and out of tune at the same time.

That's what I said about it--7/4 sounded both flat and right to me when I first heard it.

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:07 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> A barbershop singer once told me his quartet worked on a
> show with a conductor who had AP. The conductor was
> apparently driven to distraction by the sense that his
> quartet was both in tune and out of tune at the same time.

I have no problem with this concept. In fact, that's basically what
I've been trying to get at: that dissonance is an extremely complex,
multidimensional phenomenon, and that it's better to separate the
constituent components and describe them directly when possible,
rather than referring to overall "dissonance." Of course, dissonance
isn't the word you use - it's discordance. And sometimes I feel like
when you and Igs are talking about "discordance," you guys are lumping
a number of dimensions together, and a number of others you're
excluding, and it's not at all clear to me which ones you're throwing
in there or if you guys are even using the same ones. For instance,
David Huron has 14 theories of dissonance listed here, as well as 2
conjectures

http://musicog.ohio-state.edu/Music829B/main.theories.html

and I doubt this is anywhere near a complete list. You'll note that
two of them are "interval category dissonance" and, apparently,
"absolute pitch category dissonance." In this case, we're talking
about some kind of AP category dissonance paired with a different kind
of intonational consonance. Does the AP category dissonance count
towards "discordance?" Does it count when you talk about fields of
attraction? If your operational definition is what Keenan said, then I
don't see why not, but then that limits the extent to which you can
say that fields of attraction can't be conditioned.

But at this point, it just seems like we're discussing how to define
"fields of attraction" in a sensible way. This is why I tried,
unsuccessfully, to introduce the notion of us talking about very
specific psychoacoustic things that aren't ambiguous. Maybe it really
is that everyone's in on some commonly accepted viewpoint about what
these concepts mean, but I don't get it. What I do have is an internal
understanding of at least a few things that are unambiguous to me, and
which Paul and I have discussed thoroughly at length in person and on
the phone, and which he seems to agree with, for the most part - so if
I'm a nihilist, he's evil like me too.

> > I get that your "fields of attraction" have to do with people
> > tuning things by ear until they subjectively say that they're
> > maximally "in tune." And I also get that you claim that they
> > can't be changed via any training that anyone can engage in
> > while living a normal life.
>
> The edges might move around, but 21:16 is not going to be
> rated more "in tune" than 3:2. Green will not turn to red.

I don't know how to evaluate this sentence in any other way than
psychoacoustically. But, if we continue with the notion that
categorical ambiguity can it be its own type of dissonance, this is
probably not true. For example, consider someone who had a categorical
perception built around 13-EDO: 3/2 would be pretty far off what
anyone was used to, whereas 21/16 would be pretty close to it. How do
you know that someone used to 13-EDO might think the sound of 3/2 is
interesting, but that extremely trained 13-EDO musicians would just
say it "blends too much" or otherwise express displeasure that it's
not the thing they know? At least until they've untrained and
retrained themselves, anyway.

And that's just one shoot from the hip example off the top of my head.
Here's a different example maybe even Gene will appreciate: something
like 11/8 is a local maximum of Harmonic Entropy, is it not? How about
13/10? And yet people who play a lot of 13-limit harmony often some to
enjoy these intervals quite a bit, sometimes even preferring them to
ratios nearby (as in Gene's case, who rated the difference between
13/10 and 22/17 as being a "3" out of 5, where 5 is the most different
and 1 is almost imperceptibly different). People who haven't played
around as much with JI sometimes don't respond the same way. Why is
this?

I can spit out arbitrarily many theories for why it is, ranging from
changing the HE "s" value to categorizing new intervals to whatever
half-assed hypotheses you want me to concoct, but who cares why it is?
I have no answer to any of these questions, but I do know that the
effect happens, full stop. And I've observed in myself and a number of
musicians that the subjective quality of "out of tuneness" can be
conditioned to correspond to psychoacoustic "discordance," or
categorical ambiguity, or the presence of beating where you don't
expect it, or any number of things, which you can prioritize as
important in any arbitrary way that you want - or you might not even
be sure how to prioritize them at all, if different factors which
you're used to being correlated suddenly decorrelate in a novel
tuning.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> It sounds like Keenan's definition could include categorical...

It's hardly my definition. Igs posted it first.

Keenan

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 1:27 AM, Keenan Pepper <keenanpepper@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> > It sounds like Igs' definition could include categorical...
>
> It's hardly my definition. Igs posted it first.

Yes, that's what I said!

-Mike