From How Music Works, David Byrne "Sociologist H. Stith Bennett suggests that over time we developed what he calls “recording consciousness,” which means we internalize how the world sounds based on how recordings sound. He claims that the parts of our brain that deal with hearing act as a filter and, based on having heard lots of recorded sound, we simply don’t hear things that don’t fit that sonic template. In Bennett’s view, the recording becomes the ur-text, replacing the musical score. He implies that this development might have led us to listen to music more closely. By extension, one might infer that all sorts of media, not just recordings, shape how we see and hear the real world; there is little doubt that our brains can and often do narrow the scope of what we perceive to the extent that things that happen right before our eyes sometimes don’t register. In a famous experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, participants were asked to count the number of passes made by a group of basketball players in a film. Halfway through the film, a guy in a full gorilla suit runs through the middle of the action, thumping his chest. When asked afterward if they saw or heard anything unusual, more than half didn’t see the gorilla. The gorilla deniers weren’t lying; the gorilla simply never appeared to them. Things might impinge on our senses but still fail to register in the brain. Our internal filters are far more powerful than we might like to think. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that what are to us obviously faked photos of fairies were in fact real fairies captured on film. He believed that the photo shown below was real until the end of his life. So the mind’s eye is a truly variable thing. What one person hears and sees is not necessarily what another perceives. Our own sensory organs, and thus even our interpretation of data and our reading of measurements on instruments, are wildly subjective."
Posted on: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 22:59:57 +0000