hearing tests - where and how?

Kal, not sure where you got that - the subject has been researched for decades by many different people in many different countries, along with much other brain research. A Google search should yield more info than anyone would ever really care to know on the subject. Much of the knowledge was discovered quite accidentally when researchers were studying the brains of people who were deaf. There is also alot of fascinating research out there about how the brain perceives spatial distances/relationships, much of which is actually received through the ear rather than the eye, again even in deaf people. I came across some of it while researching a paper I had to write back in my college days for an acoustics course. Don't have any of those notes anymore, that was over twenty years ago now, but I know the info is out there.

Hi Kal - so apparently the research I read about back then has been called into question in the last twenty years at some point? If so, this is honestly the first I have ever heard of it - as I said, I remember it being discussed in multiple studies not as a theory, but as scientifically proven fact. Perhaps they were indeed based on the same original research, but I don't remember it that way. Certainly there are many people in the audio/music industry that believe it. I would be interested in hearing how this was disproven then, if it has been? Or was the research merely deemed unreliable by someone, which is what you seem to be implying, and if so why, if this is easily put in layman's terms? I am certainly no scientist, but the idea does seem to make sense, even if it hasn't actually been proven reliably. Please feel free to send me an email through the audiogon system if that's easier.

Agree with Shadorne, and I would also add that most audiologists should do a test that covers that.

Very good point, Orpheus. Also, research has proven that the brain can indeed perceive frequencies above those that the ear can hear, which is fascinating. Don't tell that to designers of digital processors, though, the vast majority of whom (at least as of a couple of years ago, anyway) still remove these frequencies as a matter of course, claiming that we don't miss them.

Thanks very much Kal and Al for the info and the link. Sounds to me like the question is very much unanswered. Just because modern technology cannot measure whether we can hear above 20K does not mean that we cannot. I personally would not be so dismissive of the idea as the writer of that article - I don't think it is an unimportant subject, despite the fact we can't prove it anytime soon. Clearly the results were not entirely negative, so more study is warranted.

I have always found it interesting that many proponents of analog, as stated in that article, have argued that digital processing is eliminating important info from the music. I personally have always tended to agree with this - when I listen to a digital recording of my own sound (I am a professional horn player), it seems to be missing overtones compared to the analog tape recordings I used to make of myself back in the day. You could argue that I am just imagining this, or hearing things or whatever, and you might be right, but you might be wrong as well. We can't prove it. I do know that when I play an LP from the "golden age" of orchestral recording and compare it to a digitally remastered version, the latter just doesn't sound the same. I have always thought that this processing away of anything above 20K must have something to do with that, and I didn't read anything in that article to change my mind on that, though there are certainly other things that the processing could be eliminating that would account for the difference as well, I freely admit. Fascinating stuff - I hope that we do know the answer in my lifetime. And Kal, the research referred to in that article took place after the time I read whatever I read back in college, so obviously I am misremembering that someone had scientifically proven it. I am more than happy to take your word for it that there hadn't been any other significant work done on the subject. Whoever I read must have been writing about it only as a theory. Thanks for your patience with me, I very much appreciate it!

HI guys - I am a bit mystified by your hostility to this idea - unless I read that article Al linked wrong, I thought it clearly stated that the brain activity of I think it was 6 of the 16 people registered very differently when tones above 20kHz were played. So these people obviously had some sort of perception of/reaction to it, and I thought the article also said that we didn't have the technology to understand these perceptions/reactions accurately yet. As Kal suggests, it may not have been an auditory perception, but it does not necessarily follow that this perception does not have an effect on how we perceive music. For instance, as I mentioned before, many deaf people definitely have musical perception which is clearly not auditory, and has also not been entirely explained by science at this point.

And frankly, I am also very amused to see someone in the biomedical engineering field asserting that "if there is a topic that is unsettled or begs to be investigated then there is research being conducted on the topic and articles published on the research." This is simply absurd. Of course, I admit that I am not surprised that no one is willing to fund the research in question in this thread. Unfortunately in our society, not very much research is going to get done that doesn't make a financial profit somehow for someone somewhere.

Musicnoise, there is no need to get nasty and insult mine or anyone else's intelligence in these forums. I am truly sorry if I offended you with the flippant nature of my previous post - it was not meant to be a personal attack; I was trying to be funny, very unsuccessfully I admit, and I was and still am exasperated by the fact that you are completely ignoring my real points. No, I am not a scientist, but I did work in the university library in school, helping the grad students with their music research (long before Google existed, and when the only computers were in the libraries, no one had their own yet). And I do have three full-time university professors in my immediate family, including two sociologists that do extensive research, one of them more than she teaches. I think you know very well what I meant by my comments, but you are obviously refusing, for whatever reasons, to take my points on the topic seriously, which is very disappointing. I really would like to hear exactly why, as a scientist, you think that there is no possible way the brain could perceive frequencies above 20kHz (for instance, what else would account for the increased brain activity in the 6 subjects?). As that article makes clear, it is NOT a proven scientific fact that we cannot - it merely stated that it was not a proven fact that we can. That was my main point.

The human brain is a much more sophisticated instrument than any piece of technology mankind has created, and there is a great deal about it we either don't know or can't prove. I have always contended that scientists and artists have very similar outlooks (and scientists are traditionally big supporters of the arts) - both are explorers, in a sense. However, I think in this case we are seeing a fundamental difference in temperament between you and I. You, the scientist, seem to be unwilling to even discuss seriously the possibility of something that is not definitely proven. I, the artist, am more positively imaginative about the limits of human possibility; perhaps overly so, but that remains to be seen.