Colours, Corners And Complexity

"There is a philosophical question as to what one really sees". Wittgenstein's remark raises all sorts of questions: Does one see tables and chairs, people jumping up and down, their jumps, their sadness ? Does one see colours and forms, coloured forms, dynamic and static, that are above or to the left of other coloured forms ? If the latter, are these things one sees private entities or public entities as are, presumably, tables and chairs ? If both answers are legitimate (sometimes, or whenever we see ?) what are the relations between the people we see and the coloured forms that we also see ? In other words, is what is presented to me in my visual field private, public or partly private and partly public

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Bilişsel psikolojinin bir konusu olarak müzik algısı

Music perception has a long and distinguished history as a topic of psychological research because music requires a mental activity in humans. As a complex human activity, music perception is naturally an area of interest especially to cognitive psychology. Cognitive studies suggest that listener's experience of a particular musical sequence is driven and at the same time constrained by the sounds registered by auditory mechanisms but also processed by available mental resources. This assumption indicates that researchers must take into account certain inherent limitations and capabilities of the listener. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss possible cognitive processes underlying music perception. The steps taken towards this purpose will be describing the structure of music and discussing the way that this structure is perceived by human cognition.Müzik insanda zihinsel bir aktivite gerektirdiği için psikolojik araştırmaların bir konusu olarak uzun ve ayrıcalıklı bir tarihe sahiptir. Karmaşık bir insan aktivitesi olarak müzik algısı doğal olarak özellikle bilişsel psikoloji için bir ilgi alanı olmuştur. Bilişsel çalışmalar gösteriyor ki bir dinleyicide oluşan belli bir müzik parçasından edindiği deneyim duyusal mekanizmalar tarafından kaydedilen sesler tarafından yürütülür ve aynı zamanda o sesler tarafından da sınırlandırılır fakat aynı zamanda da dinleyicinin mevcut zihinsel mekanizmaları tarafından işlenir. Bu varsayım gösterir ki araştırmacılar dinleyicinin yetenekleri ve yetersizliklerini göz önüne almalıdırlar. Bu makalenin temel amacı müzik algısının altında yatan bilişsel süreçleri tartışmaktır. Bu amaca yönelik adımlar müziğin yapısını tarif etmek ve bu yapının insan bilişsel yapısı tarafından algılanma yolunu tartışmak olacaktır

Music Perception as a Topic of Cognitive Psychology

Müzik insanda zihinsel bir aktivite gerektirdiği için psikolojik araştırmaların bir konusu olarak uzun ve ayrıcalıklı bir tarihe sahiptir. Karmaşık bir insan aktivitesi olarak müzik algısı doğal olarak özellikle bilişsel psikoloji için bir ilgi alanı olmuştur. Bilişsel çalışmalar gösteriyor ki bir dinleyicide oluşan belli bir müzik parçasından edindiği deneyim duyusal mekanizmalar tarafından kaydedilen sesler tarafından yürütülür ve aynı zamanda o sesler tarafından da sınırlandırılır fakat aynı zamanda da dinleyicinin mevcut zihinsel mekanizmaları tarafından işlenir. Bu varsayım gösterir ki araştırmacılar dinleyicinin yetenekleri ve yetersizliklerini göz önüne almalıdırlar. Bu makalenin temel amacı müzik algısının altında yatan bilişsel süreçleri tartışmaktır. Bu amaca yönelik adımlar müziğin yapısını tarif etmek ve bu yapının insan bilişsel yapısı tarafından algılanma yolunu tartışmak olacaktır.Music perception has a long and distinguished history as a topic of psychological research because music requires a mental activity in humans. As a complex human activity, music perception is naturally an area of interest especially to cognitive psychology. Cognitive studies suggest that listener's experience of a particular musical sequence is driven and at the same time constrained by the sounds registered by auditory mechanisms but also processed by available mental resources. This assumption indicates that researchers must take into account certain inherent limitations and capabilities of the listener. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss possible cognitive processes underlying music perception. The steps taken towards this purpose will be describing the structure of music and discussing the way that this structure is perceived by human cognition

Music Perception as a Topic of Cognitive Psychology

Müzik insanda zihinsel bir aktivite gerektirdiği için psikolojik araştırmaların bir konusu olarak uzun ve ayrıcalıklı bir tarihe sahiptir. Karmaşık bir insan aktivitesi olarak müzik algısı doğal olarak özellikle bilişsel psikoloji için bir ilgi alanı olmuştur. Bilişsel çalışmalar gösteriyor ki bir dinleyicide oluşan belli bir müzik parçasından edindiği deneyim duyusal mekanizmalar tarafından kaydedilen sesler tarafından yürütülür ve aynı zamanda o sesler tarafından da sınırlandırılır fakat aynı zamanda da dinleyicinin mevcut zihinsel mekanizmaları tarafından işlenir. Bu varsayım gösterir ki araştırmacılar dinleyicinin yetenekleri ve yetersizliklerini göz önüne almalıdırlar. Bu makalenin temel amacı müzik algısının altında yatan bilişsel süreçleri tartışmaktır. Bu amaca yönelik adımlar müziğin yapısını tarif etmek ve bu yapının insan bilişsel yapısı tarafından algılanma yolunu tartışmak olacaktır.Music perception has a long and distinguished history as a topic of psychological research because music requires a mental activity in humans. As a complex human activity, music perception is naturally an area of interest especially to cognitive psychology. Cognitive studies suggest that listener's experience of a particular musical sequence is driven and at the same time constrained by the sounds registered by auditory mechanisms but also processed by available mental resources. This assumption indicates that researchers must take into account certain inherent limitations and capabilities of the listener. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss possible cognitive processes underlying music perception. The steps taken towards this purpose will be describing the structure of music and discussing the way that this structure is perceived by human cognition

Olfaction As The Paradigm For Perceptual Philosophy

Plato wrote that smell is of a half-formed nature and that not much can be said about it, and Kant identified smell as the most ungrateful and most dispensable of the senses. Because contemporary philosophers share this distaste for smell perception, olfaction is often dismissed or ignored in philosophical accounts of perception. Instead, contemporary philosophy of perception is based almost exclusively on visual perception. The goal of this dissertation is to show that this focus on a single modality distorts our understanding of what perception is. I am not the first to realize the potential of opening up perceptual philosophy to the non-visual modalities. Bill Lycan asked how the philosophy of perception would be different if smell had been taken as a paradigm rather than vision. (Lycan 2000). In this dissertation, I will try to answer this question. My analysis will show that philosophy of perception would be very different, were it based on olfaction. Many of the most basic concepts of philosophy of perception are based on peculiarities of visual perception that do not generalize to other modalities

Empirical evidence for musical syntax processing? Computer simulations reveal the contribution of auditory short-term memory

During the last decade, it has been argued that (1) music processing involves syntactic representations similar to those observed in language, and (2) that music and language share similar syntactic-like processes and neural resources. This claim is important for understanding the origin of music and language abilities and, furthermore, it has clinical implications. The Western musical system, however, is rooted in psychoacoustic properties of sound, and this is not the case for linguistic syntax. Accordingly, musical syntax processing could be parsimoniously understood as an emergent property of auditory memory rather than a property of abstract processing similar to linguistic processing. To support this view, we simulated numerous empirical studies that investigated the processing of harmonic structures, using a model based on the accumulation of sensory information in auditory memory. The simulations revealed that most of the musical syntax manipulations used with behavioral and neurophysiological methods as well as with developmental and cross-cultural approaches can be accounted for by the auditory memory model. This led us to question whether current research on musical syntax can really be compared with linguistic processing. Our simulation also raises methodological and theoretical challenges to study musical syntax while disentangling the confounded low-level sensory influences. In order to investigate syntactic abilities in music comparable to language, research should preferentially use musical material with structures that circumvent the tonal effect exerted by psychoacoustic properties of sounds

Vector-based Approach to Verbal Cognition

Human verbal thinking is an object of many multidisciplinary studies Verbal cognition is often an integration of complex mental activities such as neurocognitive and psychological processes In neuro-cognitive study of language neural architecture and neuropsychological mechanism of verbal cognition are basis of a vector based modeling Human mental states as constituents of mental continuum represent an infinite set of meanings Number of meanings is not limited but numbers of words and rules that are used for building complex verbal structures are limited Verbal perception and interpretation of the multiple meanings and propositions in mental continuum can be modeled by applying tensor methods A comparison of human mental space to a vector space is an effective way of analyzing of human semantic vocabulary mental representations and rules of clustering and mapping As such Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces can be applied for a description of human semantic vocabulary and high order Additionally changes in semantics and structures can be analyzed in 3D and other dimensional spaces It is suggested that different forms of verbal representation should be analyzed in a light of vector tensor transformations Vector dot and cross product covariance and contra variance have been applied to analysis of semantic transformations and pragmatic change in high order syntax structures These ideas are supported by empirical data from typologically different languages such as Mongolian English and Russian Moreover the author argues that the vectorbased approach to cognitive linguistics offers new opportunities to develop an alternative version of quantitative semantics and thus to extend theory of Universal grammar in new dimension

A new user interface for musical timbre design

This thesis characterises and addresses problems and issues associated with the design of intuitive user interfaces for timbral control. The usability of a range of synthesis methods and representative implementations of these methods is assessed, and three interface architectures - fixed architecture, architecture specification and direct specification - are identified. The characteristics of each of these architectures, as well as problems of usability inherent to each of them are discussed; it is argued that none of them provide intuitive tools for the manipulation and control of timbre. The study examines the nature of timbre and the notion of timbre space; different kinds of timbre space are considered and criteria are proposed for the selection of suitable timbre spaces as vehicles for synthesis. A number of listening tests, designed to demonstrate the feasibility of subsequent work, were devised and carried out; the results of these tests provide evidence that, where Euclidean distances between sounds located in a given timbre space are reflected in perceptual distances, the ability of subjects to detect relative distances in different parts of the space varies with the perceptual granularity of the space. Three contrasting timbre spaces conforming to the proposed criteria for use in synthesis are constructed; the purpose of these spaces is to provide an environment for a novel user interaction approach for timbral design which incorporates a search strategy based on weighted centroid localization. Two prototypes which exemplify the proposed approach in alternative ways are designed, implemented and tested with potential users in order to validate the approach; a third contrasting prototype which represents a simple contrasting alternative is tested for purposes of comparison. The results of these tests are evaluated and discussed, and areas of further work identified