Re: My first posting

[boblong@xxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Long)]

On Wed, 16 Jul 1997 23:41:05 +0000, Willem-Jan Markerink wrote:

|Individual differences also appear in the yellow/green band, often
|resulting in disputes of whether a color is green with a blue cast,
|or blue with a green cast.=20

Sight and hearing are similar in threshold behavior.  That is, there
is a region where the perceptive faculties take least stimulation to
produce a respones--in the blue-green for light and in the area
around, I believe, 3-6 kHz for sound--and the threshold curves rise
above and below these optimum bands.  In both cases, testing the
extreme frequencies that can be perceived requires much higher
stimulation levels than obtain in the optimum bands.  But, again,
while it's tempting to emphasize the multitude of similararities
between the two senses, we draw conclusions based on such similarities
at our own risk because of all the dissimilarities.

In Newton's case, the postulation of a connection led to centuries of
"color organs" and "synesthesia" theories.  While many individuals are
entirely satisfied that connections exist, their inability to agree on
what the connections are or how they work convinces me, for one, that
the connections are illusory.  Alexander Scribin (please excuse the
old-fashioned transliteration), Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Serge
Koussevitzky, for example, all insisted that there were very strong
color associations for the various musical keys.  Since all were
master musicians, we can hardly dismiss their assertions lightly.  Yet
no two could agree on which colors were associated with which keys.

The subject, for either sense, is confused by the diversity of assumed
criteria among those who work in these fields.  When I worked on High
=46idelity Magazine, we decided that we should "calibrate" our
equipment-testing staff by having our hearing checked by an
audiologist.  We glibly wrote of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, but how many of us
could actually hear 15 kHz?  18 kHz  20 kHz?  We could find only one
local audiologist, so we made an appointment with him to discuss the
staff testing.  As it turned out, he was utterly scornful of the idea
that any frequency higher than 3 kHz had any importance.  Didn't
contribute to intelligibility, he contended.  And furthermore, as it
turned out, his equipment was incapable of testing higher frequencies.
We abandoned the calibration project.

Similarly, color-blindness is routinely tested simply as the inability
to distinguish red from green ("so you can read the traffic lights"),
while all sorts of subtler variations seem to exist--as suggested by,
among other things, W-J's post.

Bob Long
(boblong@xxxxxxxxxxx)
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