Tone Deafness

If the sounder is emitting a sound with appreciable harmonic content. Our phones clearly weren't.

The Cambridge Applied Psychology Unit had chapter and verse on the problem - which complicated their offices as well, and I got the story about the psychological measurmentments from one of them at some Cambridge party.

The phones in question had apparently actually been developed by STC at Harlow - the research centre for ITT in the UK - with some input from the Cambridge Applied Psychology Unit - but STC had neglected to ask about the choice of ring-tone.

The Bell Telephone Labs Techical Journal as widely available in the UK - I'd been reading in in the ITT-Creed library in Brighton a few years earlier - so the STC screw-up was presumably pure human stupidity.

Ours had been bought as a package with an automatic private branch exchange (PABX) and we didn't have that option.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Delightfully so! Hearing especially as you can see the *mechanical* basis of much of the "mechanism" (not so much for other senses)

Yes. If it's a "known" sound, you can use your "memory" of the tonal characteristics of the sound to gauge distance (all else being equal)

Of course, if you can't "know" (remember) the sound's characteristics, then all bets are off.

Or, if some distinctive feature is in a very high register such that it falls off rapidly with distance -- while lower frequency signals persist. I.e., all you can do is claim "it's FARTHER than XXXX"

It might be available online, in some form. Though no guarantee that the "colors" would reproduce similarly.

It's just a startling observation: that you can't *easily* differentiate among the very *different* colored balls (if I gave you *marbles*/aggies in each of those colors, you'd have no problem sorting them quickly; not so with the video images!)

[I am intrigued by shortcomings in perceptual systems]

Except that you won't know the direction if the frequency is high enough to confuse phase methods of direction determination.

Many small animals, especially ones still under parental care, have very high frequency distress signals. The theory is that is to confuse predators.

Joe Gwinn

Probably didn't realize that the issue had been researched by Bell Labs. I must say it never occurred to me that there needed to be research behind a ringer tone, because I grew up with them - they were a property of the Universe, and required no justification. I stumbled on the articles when I worked for the US FCC (which regulates telephones among other things).

What year was this? Now days, desk telephones and PBXs are independent of one another. One can always banish the pure-tone ring phones to closed offices where confusion is unlikely.

Joe Gwinn

Not a dealer, are you? As I said about a SxS switchroom, you have thousands of individual switches operating with a constant high volume background, but you can be concentrating on some activity and hear a bad switch fifty feet away...

From :

"The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. This effect is what allows most people to "tune into" a single voice and "tune out" all others. It may also describe a similar phenomenon that occurs when one may immediately DETECT WORDS OF IMPORTANCE ORIGINATING FROM UNATTENDED STIMULI, for instance hearing one's name in another conversation"

(emphasis mine).

E.g., a mother hearing her child crying in an upstairs bedroom

*while* she's engaged in a conversation with someone else in a NOISEY ROOM! (even though the cry may not be particularly loud or noticeable to others in the room!)

It could also just be smaller structures (e.g., larynges) tend to oscillate at higher frequencies! :-/

lem

he

the

-

There were a lot of human factors screw-ups that worked that way. Many piec es of equipment were easier for right-handers to use than left-handers, but nobody paid any attention (in the U.K.)until a left-handed engineer at Fer ranti put together a device which was hard for right-handers to use.

Or so I read in a human factors paper published by John Morton (then)of the Applied Psychology Unit, while I was working at ITT-Creed ...

We've have never been able to work out which one of his papers it was.

e

or

l

ange > > (PABX)and we didn't have that option.

This was in the early 1980's - I joined Cambridge Instruments in Novermber

1982. Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979 but the deregulation of British Telecom wasn't completed until 1984.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I can dial up a modem and whistle a carrier that it will connect to.

I was once told I'd make a good color corrector doing video film to tape conversions.

Can't help you.

Tim Wescott wrote:

Impressive. Now, if you can negotiate a trellis coded communication.... :) Then you've really got something!

Try being a broadcast engineer who has to monitor two TV stations, a radio station, load & run film on 16 mm projectors while reading service manuals and repairing station equipment. I also had to answer the station's main phone line when the offices were closed. I usually read one Science fiction paperback a day, in between but could keep track of everything else. I about knocked out an irritating Lieutenant, when I jumped to manual start a balky projector. Between getting hit in the balls with an office chair and being run into and knocked half way across the floor, he didn't cry all that much. ;-)

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to 
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

On a sunny day (Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:16:46 -0700 (PDT)) it happened mpm wrote in :

And, just whistle your email message..

Op Thu, 15 Aug 2013 17:18:07 +0200 schreef John Larkin :

That probably means you haven't found your personal taste yet. ;)

--
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Op Fri, 16 Aug 2013 19:29:57 +0200 schreef Jan Panteltje :

The White Walkers are coming!

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e

More likely that the relevant part of his brain didn't make the usual conne ctions when he was growing up, and got incorporated into the bits that look after fiddling with electronic circuits to make them work.

I've known very bright peole who can't do face recognition - some authors c laim that some 30% of the human brain is devoted to that particular task - and I'm inclined to suspect that the brain power that most of us use up on recognising our friends and neighbours is being otherwise employed.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Sorry for being so late to the thread. About 2 weeks ago, something happened to my right ear. I had been shooting earlier, but I was wearing plugs and shooting lighter guns, so i don't think that was it. I had been swimming a *very* little. Barely got my hair wet.

Anyway, tones in my right ear became frequency shifted, and they were louder than the right ear. Things sounded *weird*. This condition declined over about 4 days.

Had this condition been permanent, different tones of warning beepers would have been maybe a little useful at best. I have heard that cochlear implants produce weird tones.

left

On a sunny day (Sun, 25 Aug 2013 23:49:09 -0500) it happened bbhack wrote in :

Yes that IS a dillemma. ;-)

That sounds like a group cell death in the auditory ganglion and subsequent re-routing. Rather uncommon but not unheard of (incidental pun acknowledged). The nervous system is a marvelous thing.

?-)