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Re: Speech intelligibility and spatial information



Last week in Magdeburg, a neuroscientist explained that a single neuron
may respond to either auditory or visual stimuli. Why not imagine a
similar sharing of many neurons between sensory and motoric functionality?
However, if I interpret the presented physiological results correctly,
the switchover is rather sluggish.
BTW, sluggishness is not always unwelcome. It was the only way of pain
control when a surgeon removed an ulcer from the buttocks of the French king
Luis XIV by a few strikes with his scalpel.
Isn't the manual action of the blind supported by feeling instead of vision?
I guess, if we try and obstruct their feeling by thick gloves, their tuning
performance will decrease because they have to pay more attention to fine
feeling.

Eckard

At 09:54 17.09.2001 -0500, Tom Brennan wrote:

>You're correct in that piano tuning requires both otor and auditory
actions but
>the motor acts can only take place either after a sound has been heard so
that
>one knows in which direction to change a note (up or down) or if one knows
the
>result of a previous action on the tuning pins.  This does allow for some
>separation of motor and auditory actions but it true that one must listen
while
>physically tuning a note to determine the result of whatever physical actions
>are taking place.  It is also true that there are often motor actions
related to
>other listening tasks but few require a relationship to such fine motor
skills
>as required in tuning.  For those reasons, I would expect to see a different
>between blind and sighted tuners as the visual component involved would
>potentially seem to come closer to overloading the system with input than
is the
>case for the blind.  A difference just doesn't seem to be present although it
>seems to me that blind tuners seem to have an easier time closing out other
>environmental stimulation such as ambient noise when tuning.  Of course,
this is
>a very general statement with no research to back it up that I'm aware of.