Re: [Harp-L] Subject: Re: 2010 Comb Test - the Facts

[Vern <jevern@xxxxxxx>]

After three tests, a pattern has emerged:
1. Participants approach the test confident that they can discriminate among different comb materials.
2. During the test, they become frustrated to find that they cannot do so. 
3. After the results become known they complain of some test condition that prevented them from doing so.
4. Some of the witnesses who were present but did not record and submit their perceptions, declared that they could hear differences.

In the first SPAH test, the complaint was that there was noise from outside the meeting room.
In the Buckeye test, the complaint was that there was too much time between the combs.
In the Second SPAH test, the complaint was that the harmonica was too leaky.

If you run 100 tests, I predict that the results will be the same but there will be 100 new excuses to invalidate the results.  I posit that in all of the tests, the conditions were far more rigorously controlled than those under which harmonica performances normally occur.  

There were probably 50 people total involved with all of the tests.  Under the carefully-controlled conditions of those tests not one participant could do better than random guessing in recognizing differences in combs. The control of extraneous conditions can never be perfect, but were good enough to allow a participant to demonstrate the ability to hear differences.  

In the later tests, care was taken to avoid the "flaws" of the previous ones.  

Although the combs didn't seem leaky to me, leakiness might explain an inability to discriminate among them.  However, in one instance the same comb was presented three times in succession without reassembly.  Nothing was changed but all of the participants (except the ones who gave the same answers for every comb) recorded different perceptions.  Leakiness cannot explain hearing differences that were not there.  

Vern   


 
On Oct 28, 2012, at 10:38 AM, EGS1217@xxxxxxx wrote:

> Has everyone forgotten so quickly? 
> 
> Brendan first posted a po'd post on both the MBH forum AND harp-l about the 
> 2010 Comb Test and then followed up with this a week later. I remembered 
> it  well so dug it up. I've inserted Chris Michalek's post from MBH where  
> applicable.
> 
> Elizabeth
> 
> PS: As is obvious from the test and the following, TWO other players  
> (participants in the test) scored the results the same way Chris did, but  he was 
> the only one who outed his own comments. 
>