Audio Demos (Al Bregman )


Subject: Audio Demos
From:    Al Bregman  <BREGMAN(at)HEBB.PSYCH.MCGILL.CA>
Date:    Sat, 16 Sep 2000 21:20:30 -0400

Dear Colleagues, Recently Dan Levitin and I applied for a grant to fund a new project that we had in mind. The idea was to explore new auditory principles and phenomena by creating audio demonstrations that embodied them. Our model was the importance of the Gestalt demonstrations in the development of principles of perception in vision. The demonstrations were not to be of established phenomena and principles but of new ones, based on a file of research ideas and auditory phenomena that I have accumulated over the past 30 years of laboratory work, and could never hope to study via conventional lab research in my remaining research career. We planned that these demos should be available to the research community (and others) as audio on a Web site. Each demo would be accompanied by text and diagrams that would put it in a theoretical context and would explain the conclusions we wanted to draw from it, as in a research paper, but with the demonstration playing the role that the experiment normally plays in the conventional type of paper. The basic idea is not to produce demonstrations for educational purposes -- although they could be used that way -- but to further the development of theory in a way that is time-effective. We believe that a new phenomenon can be explored must faster by a few demonstrations than by doing a full-scale experiment. Demonstrations offer a way to explore many new phenomena and principles rapidly, opening them up for more precise examination through experimental research. Some of the reviewers thought the idea was very interesting but were troubled by the absence of peer review in this approach. I would like to tap the collective wisdom of the AUDITORY list members by asking all of you for suggestions about how some sort of review process could be built into this project. The main problem, in my mind, concerns the function of Editor. Who would play editor? Why would he or she want to do it? In a normal review process the editor selects the reviewers and mediates between them and the authors. Who would want to be editor for just a single project? Who would select such an editor? What about competition? In a normal editorial role, one chooses the most meritorious of competing manuscripts, and rejects the others, but in the proposed case, there is no competition, so the editor can only suggest improvements and ultimately accept or reject what has been offered. I would be most grateful for any suggestions and thoughts that you might have. -- Al ------------------------------------------------- Albert S. Bregman, Emeritus Professor Dept of Psychology, McGill University 1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 1B1 Tel: +1 (514) 398-6103 Fax: +1 (514) 398-4896 -------------------------------------------------


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