Scientists say we can see sound….

Maybe those of us who close our eyes while playing (like me) should reconsider:

http://www.livescience.com/health/080818-seeing-sound.html

And llig may have to rethink one of his pet peeves about people who rely on visual stimuli and not solely aural to learn music.

Then again, maybe a session is multi-sensory enough without the visuals. Beer on the palate, tunes ricocheting down the ear canal, and the smell of your sesson mates sweating through another set….
😉

Interestingly I have never found it easier to play with my eyes closed. Too many flitting images created by my mind become distracting - weird I know. I have found the best solution is to focus on something that is boring and immobile. That will prove embarassing for anyone that I may have inadvertently stared at, but usually I choose a beer mat at sessions.
Sessions are pretty multi-sensory events and that may be why a new difficult tune can be played easily at home but falls apart at the session - or is that just me?
When accompanying the whole experience is very visual for me. I am totally focused on feet, hands and bows and that is processed somewhere in the brain along with the sound in the ears so that my hands on the guitar know what to do. My hands get virtually no conscious processing resources.
Otherwise I don’t see that article as haivng any earth-shattering science. We know that if you block out one sense then it is natural for others to be heightened especially over a period of time. I didn’t think that they actually proved that the sound helped locate the light but just alerted the monkey that it was time to look for it.
Certainly food for thought - thanks Will

Yeah, well, it’s an interesting article that does little more than tease, like the maid behind the bar…

It’s the “potential” for “cortical plasticity”… “The ears take up the slack and stimulate the visual system”, but only according to a particular scientist, whom we must trust (simply because he’s a French scientist).

It’s “related to synesthesia”, which is “bizarre”, according to the article.

OK, I like the idea. And it interests me. But this is a junk-science article, akin to something that you might read in Popular Science. Interesting, but no meat….

(This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t open your eyes when you play, Will… God, that drives me crazy when I’m trying to convey something without having to talk!) 😉

I remember reading an article somewhere, following experiments scientists to test the sound perception abilities of averages Joes and Joelines against that of orchestra conductors.
It showed that conductors were able to perceive very subtle differences and seldom needed to close their eyes; whereas Average Joes and Joelines, struggled with the test and tended closed their eyes. It turns out that non-conductors’ abilities to make the distinctions between sounds increased quite a bit when their eyes were closed - maybe additional resources in the brain were devoted to processing the musical data?

As much as I hate it when Will closes his eyes when I’m playing with him, I close my eyes while playing on occasion too. But it’s not so that I can make distinction with what I’m hearing… It’s more to block out the other million distractions that might be happening at the time… It allows me to concentrate on my playing, and the playing of the other people there, without being distracted by the TV, the cute blonde, or the player that just sat down next to me, and is looking at me expectantly….

But before you tell me that I’m using eyes closed to make distinction between the sounds that I’m hearing… I actually think I play better with my eyes open, when I’m fixated on something else (like the TV) while I’m playing…

That is a rubbish article. I’m always skeptical of any article that begins with “Scientists say….” as if it were a new edict emanating directly from your deity-of-choice.

Anyway, any neuroscientist with half a brain would tell you that visual, auditory, and other sensory systems are not discrete, but rather interlinked in complicated networks no one really understands fully. Models of perception and sensory integration are pretty uncertain, although they’re useful for some things, but no one really has a full picture for how sensory integration works.

You’d have to look at the proper paper to know what this experiment really did, since the media has ways of simplifying and spinning these things around until they are much more exciting than the actual scientific paper, but haven’t even remote resemblance to it.

Quite good I thought. Yes, it is populist, but how else would non-neuroscientists get a handle on it. Erm, I thought he said it was unrelated to synaesthesia?
But as I read it the phenomenon is only observable at a neuronal level, and inputs from the auditory cotex (Superior STG) just attenuate the output from the primary visual cortex. But I could be wrong. Here’s the article itself (is this a truncated version?)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/9/79/abstract

I have always felt that when ever I watched a performer whether it be a singer or instrumentalist then I got more out of the piece being performed than had I just listened with my eyes closed, which many people prefer. Perhaps this is related to the article when they indicated that the monkey was more reactive to a ray of light when a sound was injected into that light. After all there is a theory that we descended from the ape.

Whole original article as PDF:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2202-9-79.pdf
All it says is a decreased reponse onset response onset is observed in 49 neurons recorded when the visual stimuli were presented simultaneously with a sound. So yeah the claims made in the populist article are preposterous.

For the most part, research scientists couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles.

but what that study really says to me is that our brains use more then just our eyes to locate things in the wild.

That’s not really astonishing to me. When I’m hunting deer in thick woods, I use my ears and my nose help to find them.

Whenever a banjo starts…I like to close my eyes since I can’t close my ears… 🙂

When I am accompanying someone who is playing chords on a string instrument such as a guitar or a mandolin, I watch their hand on the neck of the instrument carefully so I can tell which chord they are playing. For me, this helps confirm what my ears are hearing them play.
A few years ago, when I seemed to be having some problems with my hearing, I asked my doctor if I could have a hearing test. The audiologist who did the hearing test said there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with my hearing besides the normal wear and tear which occurs as you get older. However, she did say that I probably noticed there was something wrong with my hearing because I am a musician. Since I am a musician, I am used to using my ears so much and so often to distinguish between all of these different sounds and different types and timbres of sound. If I wasn’t a musician, the audiologist said that I probably wouldn’t have noticed there was anything wrong with my hearing.

“but if a dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it in no time … when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light”

We are of course viewing it the other way round. ie, when we hear a faint sound, if we look at where it’s coming from we will be able to hear it louder. (whether we actually hear it louder or just perceive it louder is neither here nor there)

We do this all time in sessions, watch the player you want to hear over the maybe not so good a player sat next to them. This isn’t rocket science.

@Donough: “that may be why a new difficult tune can be played easily at home but falls apart at the session”

I always just figured I lost about 30 IQ points whenever I sit down next to someone.

“I didn’t think that they actually proved that the sound helped locate the light but just alerted the monkey that it was time to look for it.”

Actually, they did. Well, the scientific method doesn’t prove anything, it simply fails to disprove it, and in doing so provides evidence to support it. But I digress. According to the article, if the monkey had been hearing the sound, processing it, and communicating the processed information to the motor system, the reaction would have taken a lot longer than it did. To quote the original research from the PDF the Key Maniac Lad posted, “Such fast timing of multisensory interactions rules out the possibility of an origin in the polymodal areas mediated through back projections”.
When they examined which neurons were firing and when, they saw that the 49 visual neurons they monitored were firing much more quickly when the dim light was accompanied by a sound, as though the light itself was brighter. For example, when the light was bright and no sound was presented, the response time was 144 milliseconds (ms); when the light was dim and there was no sound, response time was 172 ms (pg 10 of the PDF). But when the light was dim and there was also a sound, response time went down to 152 ms (page 11).

@Reverend: “It’s ‘related to synesthesia’”

I think you misread the Livescience article, which said “The discovery is likely *un*related to… synesthesia” (emphasis mine)

@TheSilverSpear: “… the media (have) ways of simplifying and spinning these things around until they are much more exciting than the actual scientific paper…”

Couldn’t agree more, and indeed one article does not make for a law. The biggest failing of articles aimed at the lay person is that they consistently fail to say that the scientific method rests largely on reproduction of results. For example, this study was done using two monkeys, and one of the monkeys didn’t display the results very strongly until it had been trained more in the basic task being performed. Can these results be applied to any other animals? Or even any other monkeys? Time will tell, but it will probably never make headlines, because “scientists confirm what someone else already said” just doesn’t sell magazines.

@Key Maniac Lad “the claims made in the populist article are preposterous.”
That seems like a stronger statement than anything I read in the Livescience article. Which claims are those? That the blind may be able to use the visual system to aid hearing? There’s already evidence of that in other studies. That “(t)he primary visual system is also directly activated by touch”? That statement wasn’t based on the research article, and while it might have been nice if they’d cited a source for that, if the enough primary sources confirm it, it’s considered “field of common knowledge” and doesn’t need to be cited. That we can see sound? Okay, yeah, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

@Nate Ryan “For the most part, research scientists couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles.”

Actually, a scientists is more likely to be a musician than the typical person off the street. Some have hypothesized that the creativity and math skills required to do science well also help make good music. So hey, maybe you’ve missed your calling, and the only reason cancer hasn’t been cured yet is because the folks on this board haven’t applied themselves to the problem!

“what that study really says to me is that our brains use more then just our eyes to locate things”

That was never in doubt; it’s what they’re talking about at the start of the original article when they say “multimodal processing”. The researchers are simply trying to learn more about exactly how that happens, and have provided evidence that the previously accepted mechanism (that the information from the different senses is combined at higher levels of brain function) is incorrect. Instead, they provided evidence that when you hear the sound of a deer, your visual processors process the sound directly, rather than waiting for the auditory processors to send the information up to your brain, and for your brain to send it to the visual processors.

Holy crap I have too much time on my hands.

LOL, I would never vouch for the article’s validity or scientific sophistication. Just caught my eye (without any sound attached) at yahoonews.com and it made me think of all the debates we’ve had here about visual vs. aural cues for learning and playing this music.

Erm, I posted it for a laff. And even at that, it’s a more provocative thread than “If you know a celebrity, what’s s/he really like?” 😏

But I agree that the notion of “multi-modal processing” isn’t new--except perhaps to some neuroscientists. Nothing wrong, however, with gathering evidence to explain how our brains function (particularly when it debunks silly ideas like isolated processing centers).

Rev, I close my eyes when I play because they’re old and tired. Just a chance to give them a rest. Plus, with them closed, I’m not distracted by any bobble-head banjo players who might just be in the vicinity….

😀

yes, you do have too much time on your hands, hotsauce. You’re over analysing what I said, but carry on if that’ s what keeps you off the streets. However I tend to agree with your critique on Nate ryan’s stupid statement about research scientists.
Aw, fvck this, I’m outta here. Now I remember why I generally steer clear of this site and the perennial bickering. Adios.

Hey Will, do the bobblehead banjo players bobble all the time and is that your objection? Is the occasional bobble acceptable? I’m asking because I keep catching myself bobbling very occasionally (but not while playing banjo). I blame it on Comhaltas videos, but at first I thought it might be an early symptom of some sort of musician’s palsy…

Heh, I noticed Gerry O’Connor doing it in a clip recently posted here--the toy chihuahua on the dashboard thing, or the Hula girl. But I’m most familiar with Reverend’s personal bobbling, which is always well in time with the music, but lacks the hair-tossing sensuality of the piper-with-ponytail, big-hair-metal-band headbanging abandon…..

Interesting - I’m now envisioning Night at the Roxbury, but hopefully that’s not quite it. Paddy Keenan’s playing here next Monday - he’s probably clean-cut these days, but one can always hope…