The two examples you bring up are great points illustrating how geographically and culturally isolated populations demonstrate the reality defining nature of bias.
Yes, although I would add “time” to the mix. People from the same geographical location and culture will define music differently at different points in time because preferences, ”fashion”, definitions, acceptability, etc., all evolve over time. This is obvious with popular music genres, even over relatively short time spans but it’s always been the case. Arguably the most obvious example; play Beethoven to almost anyone, even a millennial who doesn’t particularly like classical music, and they will define Beethoven’s compositions as classical music. Indeed many would describe them as quintessentially defining examples of classical music but in his day Beethoven was a “radical”, so much so that some questioned whether it even was music, rather than just sounds/noise. Ruskin, one of the most influential critics of the time stated: “
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer” and he was certainly not alone, in fact on at least one occasion Beethoven’s publisher refused to publish a new composition without substantial changes because it was too radical to be appreciated by consumers in it’s original form. Of course, this seems absurd to us today, Beethoven’s compositions are stereotypical classical music.
For instance, in western art music we have the phenomenon of harmonic vs disharmonic chord progressions and the utilization we see in the west of these musical patterns in conjunction with emotional states and moralistic judgements.
Indeed, the history western classical music can be viewed entirely from the perspective of the evolution of dissonance and consonance and the “resolution” from the former to the latter, although this diatonic/tonal basis of western classical music started breaking down in the latter part of the C19th and was deliberately discarded/avoided by many composers in the C20th. We see a similar thing to consonance/dissonance and “resolution” in other cultural music traditions, although not with western chord progressions of course, it maybe done structurally, melodically or rhythmically. Incidentally, those BBC experiments can’t be replicated today, it takes relatively little exposure to western diatonic/tonal music to become acclimatised to it, many culturally diverse/traditional music genres have been influenced by it and today there is almost no one who hasn’t been exposed to it.
One thing I've heard repeated amongst music listeners is trust your ears!
Yes, it is very common in the audiophile community, because it’s extremely easy to misrepresent its original intent/meaning and fulfil a vital marketing role. “Trust your ears” to tell you about subjective preferences/perception has been misappropriated to mean “trust your ears” to tell you what’s actually occurring in reality. Ideal for audiophile marketing purposes when in reality nothing is actually occurring, there are no audible differences, but manipulated biases can cause significant differences in perception. Taken as this misappropriated meaning, then your quoted statement is effectively an oxymoron, if you really could “trust your ears” to tell you the actual truth/objective reality, then you couldn’t be a “music listener”, you would not be able to appreciate what you‘re listening to as music, you would just hear semi-random sounds/noise devoid of any meaning (without any intellectual, emotional or enjoyable content/response). So, this meaning cannot be correct, which is why science (and us here) requires something that can “tell you the actual truth/objective reality”.
It should be noted, that it would be possible to design IEMs in such a way as to make them sensitive (to the point of audibility) to relatively small differences in cable construction/specification, thereby making the requirement of “the right cable for the job” more complicated than just buying any other IEM cable. Although one could argue that such a design would be at least partially incompetent or even defective. I have no idea if this is the case (or why it even would be) in this instance but we can’t absolutely dismiss the possibility, albeit a remote one, without some reliable evidence.
G
