reverb

[RichD]

Why does music sound better indoors?

Why? Reverb. The echoes off various surfaces are,
with good design, pleasing. But they're unnatural!
No such phenomenon exists on the Serengeti.

According to the evolutionists, traits are adapted to
a particular environment; the adaptationist paradigm.
Which includes hearing, sans doubt. We evolved to
manage in the veld, yes/no? No reverb there. Hence
our brains are optimized for such an aural environment.

Which means an echoing environment will sound unnatural,
harsh, confusing. But definitely not so. While an
outdoor concert sounds flat, boring.

Concert hall design is an art and science, but the basic
question, in any case, is why do they sound better than
the great outdoors?

Looks like further evidence that Darwin was wrong and Jupiter exists -

--
Rich

[Martin Harran]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2017 11:21:37 -0700 (PDT), RichD
<r_dela...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Why does music sound better indoors?
>
>Why? Reverb. The echoes off various surfaces are,
>with good design, pleasing. But they're unnatural!
>No such phenomenon exists on the Serengeti.

And very few of us live on the Serengeti.

>
>According to the evolutionists, traits are adapted to
>a particular environment; the adaptationist paradigm.
>Which includes hearing, sans doubt. We evolved to
>manage in the veld, yes/no?

Originally yes but recently no - we have evolved to live in a largely
man-made environment. And yes, there is a circular pattern there, I
think it might be something akin to what psychologists call
"reinforcement", I dare say some of the more scientifically educate
people here will be able to provide the equivalent evolutionary term..

>No reverb there. Hence
>our brains are optimized for such an aural environment.
>
>Which means an echoing environment will sound unnatural,
>harsh, confusing. But definitely not so. While an
>outdoor concert sounds flat, boring.
>
>Concert hall design is an art and science, but the basic
>question, in any case, is why do they sound better than
>the great outdoors?
>
>Looks like further evidence that Darwin was wrong and Jupiter exists -

Nah, just further evidence of how some people don't really understand
evolution.

[raven1]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2017 11:21:37 -0700 (PDT), RichD
<r_dela...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Why does music sound better indoors?
>
>Why? Reverb. The echoes off various surfaces are,
>with good design, pleasing. But they're unnatural!
>No such phenomenon exists on the Serengeti.

It certainly exists in canyons, caves, and many other natural
settings, so you're being pretty silly here.

[jillery]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2017 11:21:37 -0700 (PDT), RichD
<r_dela...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Well, you're half right; Jupiter exists. I leave it as an exercise
whether that makes your post half-assed.

--
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Attributed to Voltaire

[Mark Isaak]

Kudos for coming up with an argument which is not wholly transparent
crap and which I have not seen before.

Of course, although hearing is pretty nearly purely biology, music
appreciation is cultural. So your argument does not carry much force.
Plus, as others have noted, reverb exists in nature too, in some places.
Still, I grant that the basis for appreciation of reverberation is an
interesting question.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can
have." - James Baldwin

[Sean Dillon]

From what I read, it seems that a preference for reverb may come from its association with being safe and contained in a moderately small space. While there wasn't reverb on the open velt, there would have been reverb within the shelters people built or found. So to the extent that preference for reverb is biological rather than cultural (and I don't know to what extent that is true), this positive association seems like a plausible candidate for driving that preference.

[Öö Tiib]

On Monday, 7 August 2017 21:25:05 UTC+3, RichD wrote:
> Why does music sound better indoors?

You should perhaps take some big band to play in your bedroom for you to
test if that claim is fully true.

It may indicate that the natural selection did select for those
designers of that entertainment and the instruments used who achieved
that the musicians were called indoors for better listening
by those in big houses and with power to command their fortune. ;)

[czeba...@gmail.com]

Musical entertainers create outdoor reverberation by sending a delayed copy of the original signal in analog or digital form to the main speakers.

gregwrld

[RonO]

Actually, our primate ancestors evolved for many times longer in the
cathedral of the forest than on the open plain. Look it up. Start with
tree shrews around 80 million years ago. Compared with that what would
you expect to change about our hearing in a couple million years. Homo
habilis was still quite arboreal and evolved around 2 million years ago.

Ron Okimoto

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2017 04:54:46 -0500, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by RonO <roki...@cox.net>:

I was under the impression that H. habilis had already
evolved to be primarily a ground dweller? According to...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis

....bipedalism, which IIRC is indicative of a shift away from
an arboreal lifestyle, occurred prior to Australopithecus, a
couple million years (and possibly as much as 5My) before H.
habilis.
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 09 Aug 2017 10:54:12 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:

Ron? Any comment to make on this?

[RonO]

If you read about Homo habilis you will find out that they retained
arboreal features.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18711733

QUOTE:
Abstract
The Homo habilis OH 62 partial skeleton has played an important,
although controversial role in interpretations of early Homo locomotor
behavior. Past interpretive problems stemmed from uncertain bone length
estimates and comparisons using external bone breadth proportions, which
do not clearly distinguish between modern humans and apes. Here, true
cross-sectional bone strength measurements of the OH 62 femur and
humerus are compared with those of modern humans and chimpanzees, as
well as two early H. erectus specimens-KNM-WT 15000 and KNM-ER 1808. The
comparative sections include two locations in the femur and two in the
humerus in order to encompass the range of possible section positions in
the OH 62 specimens. For each combination of section locations, femoral
to humeral strength proportions of OH 62 fall below the 95% confidence
interval of modern humans, and for most comparisons, within the 95%
confidence interval of chimpanzees. In contrast, the two H. erectus
specimens both fall within or even above the modern human distributions.
This indicates that load distribution between the limbs, and by
implication, locomotor behavior, was significantly different in H.
habilis from that of H. erectus and modern humans. When considered with
other postcranial evidence, the most likely interpretation is that H.
habilis, although bipedal when terrestrial, still engaged in frequent
arboreal behavior, while H. erectus was a completely committed
terrestrial biped. This adds to the evidence that H. habilis (sensu
stricto) and H. erectus represent ecologically distinct, parallel
lineages during the early Pleistocene.
END QUOTE:

Ron Okimoto

[Bob Casanova]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 16:38:32 -0500, the following appeared

OK, thanks. That makes sense, although I'm curious whether
gorillas and chimps, both of which (I believe this is true
for gorillas, and the article specifically says it is for
chimps) exhibit the sort of limb-strength distribution
attributed to H. habilis, would also be considered to be
significantly arboreal using this logic, although we know
from observation that neither is particularly arboreal.

[RonO]

The great apes like chimps and gorillas are knuckle walkers that spend a
lot of time on the ground, but their hands, feet and limbs are still
adapted to an arboreal lifestyle which they do indulge in. They do not
live on the savanna, but in the forest. Anthropologists have long noted
that the hominid lineage leading to humans from the great apes is more
like orangutans than the African great apes. One explanation is that
chimps and gorillas adopted a similar terrestrial lifestyle and have
evolved similar adaptations. There isn't any fossil evidence that the
human lineage went through a knuckle walking phase.

Ron Okimoto

[Bob Casanova]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 18:59:24 -0500, the following appeared

OK; thanks again. I was specifically thinking of
knuckle-walking as the reason why arboreal characteristics
may have survived the transition to a non-arboreal
lifestyle, but the lack of fossil evidence that H. habilis'
lineage went through that stage seems indeed to be evidence
against it, at least to some extent.

As an aside, I was under the impression that neither chimps
nor gorillas spend more than a minimal amount of time in
trees, but a bit of digging...

https://www.primates.com/gorillas/gorilla-info.html
http://anthro.palomar.edu/primate/prim_7.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_chimpanzee

....shows I was mistaken.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Monday, 7 August 2017 19:25:05 UTC+1, RichD wrote:
> Why does music sound better indoors?
>
> Why? Reverb. The echoes off various surfaces are,
> with good design, pleasing. But they're unnatural!
> No such phenomenon exists on the Serengeti.
>
> According to the evolutionists, traits are adapted to
> a particular environment; the adaptationist paradigm.
> Which includes hearing, sans doubt. We evolved to
> manage in the veld, yes/no? No reverb there. Hence
> our brains are optimized for such an aural environment.
>
> Which means an echoing environment will sound unnatural,
> harsh, confusing. But definitely not so. While an
> outdoor concert sounds flat, boring.

Because you're too cheap to buy good seats.

> Concert hall design is an art and science, but the basic
> question, in any case, is why do they sound better than
> the great outdoors?
>
> Looks like further evidence that Darwin was wrong
> and Jupiter exists -

Holst your horses.

A number of experiments show that what is unnatural
may be more attractive than the natural. For instance,
consider Sugar Frosted Flakes, or breast implants.