[Dixielandjazz] Sceptics, perfect pitch etc

[anton.crouch at optusnet.com.au]

Hello all

As, I hope, a low-key sceptic I have to add a bit more to the Suhor/Vickery discussion.

While it's correct to say that the onus is on the proposer to demonstrate the "truth" of a proposition, in practice this is either difficult or impossible. Most science proceeds via the path of probability and engages in hypothesis testing. And here's where it gets hard.

It is fundamental to the nature of hypotheses that they can never be shown to be true, only false. If you doubt this, think of the example from the Middle Ages when, in logic, a common example of a universal statement was "all swans are white". This was entirely reasonable - the only swans that Europeans had ever seen were white. Come the later Dutch voyages of exploration and the discovery of the west coast of Terra Australis: oh, oh - black swans. No number of confirming instances can show a hypothesis to be true but only a single contrary instance can show it to be false.

>From a brief look at the material on the "Mozart effect", it seems to me that all the proponents have done is to erect a superficially plausible hypothesis. To date the experimental work has not been reproduced and it still awaits testing by a null hypothesis method.

The matter of "perfect pitch" has always intrigued me and a visit to the UCSF site does not help in answering the fundamental question - what do people actually mean by the term? It seems to me that the term only makes sense if we define it acoustically, not musically.

If a period instrument player and philharmonic symphony player hear 415 Hz and one says that it's A and the other says it's G sharp, who is "right"? Both of them? Do they both have "perfect pitch"?

Imperfectly,
Anton