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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Dennett on pain (was Does AI make philosophy obsolete?)
Message-ID: <1995Sep8.223907.6618@media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <JMC.95Sep2160839@Steam.stanford.edu> <42d9ha$qk8@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk> <DELKqM.JwD@festival.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 22:39:07 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:33268 sci.cognitive:9516 sci.psychology.theory:623

In article <DELKqM.JwD@festival.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>In article <42d9ha$qk8@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk> A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>
>>Who knows -- the more sophisticated robots may even find it painful
>>to hear a mozart quartet played out of tune,
>
>In 
>
> AUTHOR(S)       :Seashore, Carl Emil 1866-1949
> TITLE           :Psychology of music
> IMPRINT         :New York London : McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1938
> SERIES          :McGraw-Hill publications in psychology
>
>Seashore reports an investigation of a highly talented musical family,
>who all had much better hearing than average. He was surprised to find
>that the family member with the best hearing he had ever tested not
>only was not a musician, but actively disliked music. It turned out
>that this man's hearing was sufficiently fine that he couldn't bear to
>listen to music -- it was *always* painfully out of tune. The
>even-tempered deception just didn't work with ears as good as his. So
>if robots are to be able to hear human music as we do, they will need
>to be equipped with ears physically and cognitively close to our own;
>and we are still far from understanding human ears.


Do you know if that subject had absolute pitch.  Was he good at
identifying intervals?  It always seemed to me that there should be a
bit of a conflict between these, in the sense that absolute pitch
should conflict a bit with relative pitch, because it requires a non
translation-invariant component of perception.   If the system had
*only* absolute pitch perception, then a tune would be hard to
recognize when played out of tune or, worse, when sung in a different
key.

Presumably in the good musician with absolute pitch, the absolute
recognition feature is separate (and non-interfering) with the
relative pitch perception.  In other people,  absolute pitch might
involve a "defect" in the normal interval-invariant perception
machinery.  Do you know if there exist any people with only absolute
pitch?  I would expect them also to have trouble with speech, because
different people tend to have different fundamental pitches.

Presumable the Seashore tests, being musically oriented, do indeed
test for interval recognition ability as well as plain crude audition.

