Lehman Purity explaned

Actually, all kidding aside (Brad's ribs must getting rather bruised
by now), I suspect what is going on here is akin to the sort of thing
that happens with language. As anyone who has gone off to live in a
foreign country knows, after a year or two you enter a very bothersome
period where your basic mastery of the new language is pretty good,
but when you find yourself in a party or a pub, you have a terrible
time following the simplest conversations. This is because in a noisy
environment, much of the actual information is masked by the noise,
and you simply cannot hear it. Native speakers have a vast library of
expectation which the brain instantly consults to interpret the
incomplete information which the aural apparatus receives. The same
effect can be duplicated by simply taking a recording of someone
speaking and inserting random snippets of silence. The native speaker
will always have a much higher tolerance for data loss than a
foreigner, precisely because the native brain uses the tool of
expectation to fill in the missing bits. In the case of language, the
mind is usually right, though as everyone nows, even in your own
language, sometimes the process goes amiss under such circumstances.
The important point is that the brain is actively imagining something
which is not perceived. We THINK we hear everything the other person
is saying, but if we could make a recording with microphones placed
next to our ears and then analyze it for actual content, we would find
that much of the audio signal of the person's voice is simply not there.

Now it appears that Brad is under the influence of the same mechanism,
and his expectation based upon years of playing Baroque music are so
strong that he is incapable of separating that which his musical
imagination creates inside his own internal musical soundscape and
that which is the objective acoustic reality, perceivable by others
and/or measurable by equipment and/or explainable by acoustic theory.
Difference tones are an example of something which is not measurable
by machines (they don't show up on spectrograms or FFT, for example),
yet they can be heard by everyone and are readily explainable based on
how the inner ear functions. Brad's phantom dominant 7 roots, however,
simply have no explanation, not even one he himself can offer expect
that one must be "an expert in 18th century continuo realization" or
that you must "think harmonically", both of which support my theory
that it is an example of internal elaboration rather than actual
perception. Nor can Brad's phantom tones be measured, and since nobody
else hear can hear them, the most likely explanation is indeed that of
subjective expectation influencing perception. The same might be said
for Brad's application of the word "pure" to an interval which is
obviously impure in any normal sense of the word.

The history of science is of course full of such incidences, and the
fact that the subjects really honestly believe they are perceiving
what they report does not change the fact that they are only being
deluded by their own mind. As the I Ching always says, No Blame.

Ciao,

P