In my .. somewhat limited 'further study' of psychoacoustics, I have read a few very interesting concepts related to how the brain processes the music it hears. Alot of the more interesting things I have discovered seem pretty obvious after thinking about about it for awhile.

An example of this is a section of a book that was talking about timbre, auditory illusions, and how our brains "fill in the gaps."

There are scientists who have been studying whether or not we are all capable of learning any language, at birth. It is our experience with our native languages, and the way phrases are shaped and built within that language that affects the way we perceive emotion and the way we understand other people's emotion. This information get programmed into our neural networks very early in our lives.

Emotion can be conveyed through music using things like phrasing and dynamics, because our brains transfer the data saved from our commonly known speech patterns, and relates it to the music.

One question I have, is why some people enjoy branching out and exploring new musical genres, but some people get stuck on the same music all the time.

-matt

psychoacoustics

The other day I was reading through some articles on different aspects of psychoacoustics (I think this stuff is fascinating), and I came across a very interesting concept. The idea of 'stereo' is that the music is supposed to psychologically seem to have sounds coming from different locations, and sometimes differing distances. In my experience, it is pretty difficult to achieve a stereo setup that accurately recreates the effect. I ran across this website where they talk about an 'eight-fold space' music listening recording setup and listening environment. Basically, you would record each instrument onto its own track, and play it back using 8 identical full range speakers and 8 identical amplifiers, one on each wall and one in each corner of a square room. This is much different from what most people think of when they talk about "surround sound."

Here is the website:
http://timbreproductions.com/pages/mental_psychoacoustics.html
Their website is terrible, but the concept is really neat.

One question, is if this concept is known as something other than "eight-fold" recording.
Also, I was wondering if you knew of any good books/websites with in depth information about psychoacoustics