<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>Hi Dmitri,</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>On Apr 5, 2009, at 10:34 AM, Dmitri Tymoczko wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div><br></div></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div>I think we might disagree about how important the subtleties are, or about the level of detail required.</div></blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>First of all, it will be fair to say that I recognize a lot of common methodological ground between you and me. Therefore, I offer my comments in the spirit of clarification, not radical disagreement. However, as they say, the devil is in the details, on which I will gently but firmly insist.</div><div><br></div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">Typical spoken English contains syntactic units that are about 13 words long, as compared to written English, in which the syntactic units are 22 words long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This contrasts with the length of classical movements, which can be 20 minutes long, and can contain hundreds of measures and tens of thousands of notes. Furthermore, the accuracy of linguistic perception is significantly higher than that of musical perception -- any way you slice it, there is an enormous amount of information loss in musical perception, whereas linguistic perception is remarkably accurate. The differences here are dramatic and not at all subtle -- we're talking orders of magnitude, rather than factors of 2.</span></div></blockquote><div><br></div>To your above estimates, I respond by simply quoting my earlier comment: "It is generally agreed that this capacity depends on the specific type of mental coding involved, and cannot be simply defined in terms of the symbolic content of the stimulus at the surface level." In other words, it may not be good enough to simply count measures and notes. And the way we count could affect the answer even by an order of magnitude. Memory is a reconstructive process, in which a chunk that has been learned schematically, and counts as one unit in terms of information processing load, can be unpacked to represent a large number of surface events, such as notes. The question is: What are the chunks that are involved in music processing specifically?</div><div><br></div><div>Also, accuracy is not a direct measure of processing capacity, since the former also involves the strength of the relevant long-term memory structures evoked in parsing the stimulus. It is indeed likely that we have better and quicker access to structures that enable us to parse a sentence than we do for those structures that help us parse musical structure. So accuracy does not simply boil down to how big a hierarchical tree we can fit in working memory in each case.</div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">All I'm trying to say is: if we really believe we have good evidence for such an important claim -- that recursive perception in music far outstrips that in language -- then we let's get serious and try to prove it conclusively, and communicate it to the wider scientific world. </span></div></blockquote><div><br></div>Absolutely. I am with you!</div><div><br></div><div>Panos</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">DT</span></font></div><div><br></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div>Dmitri Tymoczko</div><div>Associate<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Professor of Music</div><div>310 Woolworth Center</div><div>Princeton, NJ 08544-1007</div><div>(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)</div><div><a href="http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri">http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Smt-talk mailing list</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:Smt-talk@societymusictheory.org">Smt-talk@societymusictheory.org</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://lists.societymusictheory.org/listinfo.cgi/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org">http://lists.societymusictheory.org/listinfo.cgi/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org</a></div> </blockquote></div><br></body></html>