As medicine is to the body, so psychology is supposed to be to the mind or soul.
Doctors and surgeons are in the business of fixing stuff that is obviously and identifiably wrong or broken: broken bones, lumps in the brain, wounds from accidents or fights, really bad cases of food poisoning, malaria, the pox, chlamydia (the STD of preference for straight people), cleft palate… something that can be identified and treated in some way.
At the other end of the spectrum are the physical trainers and dieticians working with (say) a movie star or a Olympic team, or cosmetic surgeons. The aim is to improve something that is already okay and provides a foundation for that improvement.
It’s the in-between that’s awkward. People who aren’t actually sick, but who keep getting colds and infections. People who aren’t actually obese, but who can’t sustain much physical effort. People who have poor diets or can’t get enough exercise. There’s nothing broken and they aren’t suffering from the effects of a virus or bacteria, but they aren’t exactly shining examples of the potential of the human body either. Doctors can’t help because there’s nothing much wrong, and the trainers can’t help because there’s not enough right either.
As with the body, so with the mind.
Psychiatrists are in the business of fixing stuff that is obviously so wrong that the patient is experiencing distress and impaired functioning in their everyday life over an expended period, usually at least six months and often more than a year. That’s a general condition for a psychiatric disorder in the DSM-5. Look at the symptom lists and you will realise that to get a DSM-grade diagnosis, you’re in a bad way. There are symptoms which on their own would have people backing away from the patient slowly and politely and blocking their calls - and DSM diagoses usually require three of more of these. Psychiatrists are also doctors, can prescribe, and insurance companies will often stump up on their signature. Their medical training leads them to want to deal with conditions where there is obviously and identifiably something wrong.
At the other end are of the spectrum are life coaches, dating coaches, PR coaches, dieticians, beauticians, and physical trainers, who work with the (usually) well-off and high(er) functioning middle- and upper-classes. The aim is to improve something that is already working reasonably well.
It’s the in-between that’s awkward. The people who aren’t quite distressed, but don’t feel happy either. They are holding down a job suitable for their abilities, paying the bills, eating reasonably, not getting blitzed every night, and otherwise taking care of everyday maintenance… but they might not be having much fun either. They aren’t scared of talking to people, but it’s not their favourite thing to do. They don’t think they are awful, but there’s a nagging voice in residence somewhere in their head. Or maybe they are just oblivious and wonder why they only ever meet people once. They may get hugs, but not from the person they really want to be hugged by - just someone who will do.
These people are the market for psycho-therapy. They need to be working or have access to money because they will need to pay the therapist themselves - the insurance companies only pay for psychiatrists - and maybe they could get some therapy on the NHS. If they could get to see a GP, and the GP didn’t just write for some low-grade prescription anti-depressants.
What are psycho-therapists supposed to do with these people? Find something wrong and try to fix it? Give the patient what amounts to a self-improvement programme of exercise, dietary change, sleep routines, removing negative thinking and all that jazz? If the patient comes in with a specific problem, the chances are that what they need is a specific solution, and specific is self-improvement.
At first they seemed to follow Freud’s example, and sit quiet while the client talked, or not. The few techniques they used were close to, if not outright, hacks, from so-called “active listening” to suggesting people wrote with their other hand, as it let one’s creativity flow more easily. Some would head for childhood, to find fault there (and be rude about the client’s parents in the process), and some would look for patterns of behaviour that needed changing. Some would interact with the client and some would stay quiet. And some use the “models” from so-called “positive psychology”.
Tuesday, 21 May 2024
Friday, 17 May 2024
Psychology as Pre-Science
The first time I read Gaston Bachelard’s The Making of the Scientific Mind, I didn’t really understand what I was reading. Same the second time. I mean, I understood the words, but I didn’t get the message. I was expecting to read a story about the change between pre-scientific to scientific ways of thinking. Since Bachelard’s subject is chemistry and life sciences, that transition isn’t as stark as it is in physics.
The book is full of extensive quotes from authors, now unknown as scientists, but famous at the time for writing about phenomena in the real world. Bachelard’s point is that they do so in a shallow way, often using analogies with familiar objects and their properties - the number of things claimed to be analogous to sponges is quite remarkable. These old-style “explanations” read fluently, and no doubt at the time, plausibly. Now, of course, it reads as grammatical gibberish.
It feels like reading a lot of contemporary psychology.
Those seventeenth-century authors made experiments as well. Hundreds of them, but all of them by today’s standards slightly mad, or trivial, having nothing to do with the fundamentals of the relevant science. We’re talking about experiments to prove which combination of coloured tights generates more static electricity. As if that might be significant in itself, rather than, as we would see it, a consequence of more fundamental laws of chemistry and the properties of the dyes and materials.
That feels a lot like contemporary psychology.
People have been making remarks about human behaviour and emotions since before Plato thought that laughter was a way of showing oneself superior to the person one was laughing at. Hume’s famous book is called A Treatise on Human Nature - it’s an extended rant about how devious and rotten people are, interspersed with some more conventional philosophising about the various aspects of the psyche (Reason, Passions, Understanding, and so on). Some of what Hume and others said was perspicacious, some more relevant to their times than ours, and some of it just wrong.
Psychology has many birthdates, and the publication of William James’ two-volume book on Psychology is as good as any other. It’s an odd book, with chapters on how the sense organs work, and a much more famous one exhorting us to the formation of habits as a way to simplify our lives. Descriptive anatomy right alongside old-school moralising. Psychologists have never gave up the combination. Even the ones who look as though they are doing “real science” by investigating the way the brain works, cannot resist the temptation to write pop-science pot-boilers about how their work proves we have no free will or that consciousness is an illusion.
In the next few posts, I’m going to wander around this subject.
The book is full of extensive quotes from authors, now unknown as scientists, but famous at the time for writing about phenomena in the real world. Bachelard’s point is that they do so in a shallow way, often using analogies with familiar objects and their properties - the number of things claimed to be analogous to sponges is quite remarkable. These old-style “explanations” read fluently, and no doubt at the time, plausibly. Now, of course, it reads as grammatical gibberish.
It feels like reading a lot of contemporary psychology.
Those seventeenth-century authors made experiments as well. Hundreds of them, but all of them by today’s standards slightly mad, or trivial, having nothing to do with the fundamentals of the relevant science. We’re talking about experiments to prove which combination of coloured tights generates more static electricity. As if that might be significant in itself, rather than, as we would see it, a consequence of more fundamental laws of chemistry and the properties of the dyes and materials.
That feels a lot like contemporary psychology.
People have been making remarks about human behaviour and emotions since before Plato thought that laughter was a way of showing oneself superior to the person one was laughing at. Hume’s famous book is called A Treatise on Human Nature - it’s an extended rant about how devious and rotten people are, interspersed with some more conventional philosophising about the various aspects of the psyche (Reason, Passions, Understanding, and so on). Some of what Hume and others said was perspicacious, some more relevant to their times than ours, and some of it just wrong.
Psychology has many birthdates, and the publication of William James’ two-volume book on Psychology is as good as any other. It’s an odd book, with chapters on how the sense organs work, and a much more famous one exhorting us to the formation of habits as a way to simplify our lives. Descriptive anatomy right alongside old-school moralising. Psychologists have never gave up the combination. Even the ones who look as though they are doing “real science” by investigating the way the brain works, cannot resist the temptation to write pop-science pot-boilers about how their work proves we have no free will or that consciousness is an illusion.
In the next few posts, I’m going to wander around this subject.
Tuesday, 14 May 2024
Sight-Reading
I’m also spending some time learning to sight-read. Using the Allemande from the first Bach Cello suite. Since it’s for the cello, it’s in the bass clef, mostly in the octave below middle C, with occasional excursion above and below. It’s best played in concert pitch on the guitar, as opposed to an octave lower, though it could be played an octave higher.
Repeat after me: Every Good Band Deserves Fans And Cash. Those are the notes on the lines of the bass clef, starting with the ledger line below the main stave and ending with middle C(ash) one ledger line above the main stave.
I tried this a long time ago, but I struggled with the bass clef. Attempting to sight-read on the piano, which takes the “Grand Clef” (treble on top, bass below, middle C, well, in the middle) seemed to have eased reading the bass clef, partly because I spent a long time reciting the notes on the staves.
Remember running your finger under the words to help you read? Remember pronouncing a word one syllable at a time? Remember looking at a combination of letters and thinking “huh”?
All that and more. I follow the notes for a while, and then the tune drops to the bottom of the stave and I’m like “ummm, A? B? G?” Or I follow four notes but don’t finish on the E but the D. Huh? Oh! That’s an A I should be starting on, not a G.
As for playing the notes so that an actual tune emerges?
Oh. The tune? Where’s that?
The tune emerges when I play the notes without hesitation, fluently.
Ah yes, fluency. Playing the right notes in the right order isn’t enough. There’s more.
I know what it takes to read fluently: one has to read ahead and think about that, while one’s fingers are playing what one read a moment ago, because it was passed it to the complier, translated into muscle actions which were stored in short-term memory and are now being played . Which is what fluent word-readers do.
It takes a while for the brain to create that compiler, the memory, and the mechanism to take the muscle actions from memory and execute them. Building all that is what it means to “read music”.
It isn’t memorising the piece. That’s different.
This is one of those tasks that one starts and carries on despite seeming to make no progress, because I suspect that when the brain does construct the read-ahead compiler, it kicks in fast and makes all the slog worthwhile.
Talk to me in a year.
Repeat after me: Every Good Band Deserves Fans And Cash. Those are the notes on the lines of the bass clef, starting with the ledger line below the main stave and ending with middle C(ash) one ledger line above the main stave.
I tried this a long time ago, but I struggled with the bass clef. Attempting to sight-read on the piano, which takes the “Grand Clef” (treble on top, bass below, middle C, well, in the middle) seemed to have eased reading the bass clef, partly because I spent a long time reciting the notes on the staves.
Remember running your finger under the words to help you read? Remember pronouncing a word one syllable at a time? Remember looking at a combination of letters and thinking “huh”?
All that and more. I follow the notes for a while, and then the tune drops to the bottom of the stave and I’m like “ummm, A? B? G?” Or I follow four notes but don’t finish on the E but the D. Huh? Oh! That’s an A I should be starting on, not a G.
As for playing the notes so that an actual tune emerges?
Oh. The tune? Where’s that?
The tune emerges when I play the notes without hesitation, fluently.
Ah yes, fluency. Playing the right notes in the right order isn’t enough. There’s more.
I know what it takes to read fluently: one has to read ahead and think about that, while one’s fingers are playing what one read a moment ago, because it was passed it to the complier, translated into muscle actions which were stored in short-term memory and are now being played . Which is what fluent word-readers do.
It takes a while for the brain to create that compiler, the memory, and the mechanism to take the muscle actions from memory and execute them. Building all that is what it means to “read music”.
It isn’t memorising the piece. That’s different.
This is one of those tasks that one starts and carries on despite seeming to make no progress, because I suspect that when the brain does construct the read-ahead compiler, it kicks in fast and makes all the slog worthwhile.
Talk to me in a year.
Friday, 10 May 2024
HX Effects - Effects and Sounds
There are a whole load of pedals out there, and some can cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds (Klons). All of them do one of these eight things:
Drive (Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz);
Compressors / Limiters / Noise Gates;
Reverb / Echo;
Delay;
Modulation (Wah, Chorus etc);
EQ;
Looper;
Volume / Effects level control.
Guitar output and amp Master volume affect the tones, especially the Drive tones.
Even back in the 1960’s, when life was simple and Jim Marshall made you an amp while you waited (well, ok, not quite), studios had a number of effects: reverb, EQ, compressors, filters, as well as a bunch of special effects that the electronic music people had invented. The ultimate piece of electronic music of the 20th century, the Doctor Who theme, was made in a 1960’s sound lab on magnetic tape that was hand-edited.
The processor in the HX Effects can handle up to nine effects (or “blocks”) in one Preset, and has six switches for each pre-set. So I can build an effect out of nine others.
None are compulsory, and some play better with others. A tone based on Drives usually doesn’t work well with anything else except a simple-ish Reverb, but I understand that shoegaze bands started with a metric tonne of distortion and added more effects. So there’s that.
The one effect that hasn’t been transferred to pedals is the resonance that an acoustic guitar has. It’s a mixture of sustain (caused by the momentum of the vibrations of the wood) and reverb (of the sound waves in the hollow body). This is different from the sound of an electric being strummed with the power off, where the resonance comes from the continued vibration of the strings. Take your fingers off the strings on an acoustic and there’s still a lingering sound. Do that on an electric and the sound stops dead.
My unconscious was looking for that acoustic resonance, and I’ve been finding it something like it in combinations of delay and reverb.
Then there’s the most divisive drive pedal there is: the Tube Screamer. Apparently if you use 11’s and a Tube Screamer, you will automatically sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but without, you know, the talent. I have 11’s and have tried the Tube Screamer effect, and even allowing for my lack of talent, I still don’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, so there must be something more to it.
Any tone I get under these circumstances is an amp in the room tone, as opposed to guitar in the mix tone. Get a neat tone in-the-room and then use it play along with a backing track: chances are it won’t blend in. At all. For a long time now, the original sound of the instruments has been merely a starting-point for the final sound. If I do get a tone - usually by randomly messing with the pots - that blends in, often it sounds thin and unconvincing in-the-room.
So here’s the pay-off.
In one session recently I was tweaking one of the ready-made presets in the Effects: it had a delay, reverb, chorus, boost and maybe some distortion. I took out the distortion, experimented with the chorus, reverb and delay, and started playing some triads. Twenty minutes later, I stopped.
That’s when I realised what I was really looking for. A sound that makes me want to play more and more. That I can get lost in. Usually that means something ambient-y with delays and reverbs, but it needn’t. So far I’ve found a couple, not counting neck-pickup-clean + a sprinkle of reverb.
Even back in the 1960’s, when life was simple and Jim Marshall made you an amp while you waited (well, ok, not quite), studios had a number of effects: reverb, EQ, compressors, filters, as well as a bunch of special effects that the electronic music people had invented. The ultimate piece of electronic music of the 20th century, the Doctor Who theme, was made in a 1960’s sound lab on magnetic tape that was hand-edited.
The processor in the HX Effects can handle up to nine effects (or “blocks”) in one Preset, and has six switches for each pre-set. So I can build an effect out of nine others.
None are compulsory, and some play better with others. A tone based on Drives usually doesn’t work well with anything else except a simple-ish Reverb, but I understand that shoegaze bands started with a metric tonne of distortion and added more effects. So there’s that.
The one effect that hasn’t been transferred to pedals is the resonance that an acoustic guitar has. It’s a mixture of sustain (caused by the momentum of the vibrations of the wood) and reverb (of the sound waves in the hollow body). This is different from the sound of an electric being strummed with the power off, where the resonance comes from the continued vibration of the strings. Take your fingers off the strings on an acoustic and there’s still a lingering sound. Do that on an electric and the sound stops dead.
My unconscious was looking for that acoustic resonance, and I’ve been finding it something like it in combinations of delay and reverb.
Then there’s the most divisive drive pedal there is: the Tube Screamer. Apparently if you use 11’s and a Tube Screamer, you will automatically sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but without, you know, the talent. I have 11’s and have tried the Tube Screamer effect, and even allowing for my lack of talent, I still don’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, so there must be something more to it.
Any tone I get under these circumstances is an amp in the room tone, as opposed to guitar in the mix tone. Get a neat tone in-the-room and then use it play along with a backing track: chances are it won’t blend in. At all. For a long time now, the original sound of the instruments has been merely a starting-point for the final sound. If I do get a tone - usually by randomly messing with the pots - that blends in, often it sounds thin and unconvincing in-the-room.
So here’s the pay-off.
In one session recently I was tweaking one of the ready-made presets in the Effects: it had a delay, reverb, chorus, boost and maybe some distortion. I took out the distortion, experimented with the chorus, reverb and delay, and started playing some triads. Twenty minutes later, I stopped.
That’s when I realised what I was really looking for. A sound that makes me want to play more and more. That I can get lost in. Usually that means something ambient-y with delays and reverbs, but it needn’t. So far I’ve found a couple, not counting neck-pickup-clean + a sprinkle of reverb.
Tuesday, 7 May 2024
HX Effects + Katana Set-Up
I bought an HX Effects at the end of March, from those nice people at GuitarGuitar Camden, where you can buy any guitar you like as long as it’s a Strat and costs £2,000+ (I am exaggerating only slightly. It is cheaper than Denmark Street where the prices start at £2,000 and ascend very quickly.) Since then I haven’t written anything about my endless Tone Journey.
Imagine being dropped in a guitar shop, given the keys to the pedal cabinet and told to play around all your like. That’s what getting an HX Effects is.
I’m playing it through the Katana, (edit: 9/6) using the Instrument In, pre-amp gain at zero, pre-amp volume nearly dimed, Mid-EQ dimed, Treble and Bass at 12:00. The power amp is set at “0.5W” (/edit) and I control the output with the Master volume.
I’m playing mostly between 65-75 dBA, and have made the following very important adjustment to the amp positioning.
I sit on a barstool about two metres away, on a chair about a meter away, depending on whether I’m using the HX Edit program.
Brief acoustics digression. When the wavelength of a note is less than the diameter of the speaker, that note and those above it will start to “beam” out of the speaker. For a 12” speaker, that frequency is around 1100 Hz, which is about the highest note on the guitar. BUT, guitar strings produce a lot of overtones - fifths and octaves - which are not a lot quieter than the fundamental tone - so that playing A440 produces second harmonics of 1,760 Hz, which will go out like a lightbeam from a big speaker (okay, there are lobes to the side, but only if you’re doing a science degree). Stand to one side or above the speaker and those higher harmonics will pass you right by: the sound will be smoother and lack bite. What I heard over at my friend’s place, where we sit with our heads at speaker level, were all those higher harmonics, which gave the impression of bite and air. This is why mic-ing speakers is more of an art than it should be: where you put the mic affects what exact mix of overtones and bass notes you get.
Chasing tone is to acoustics what cooking is to chemistry: there’s a science underneath it, but mostly it’s applied magic.
The towel under the front of the speaker means I get the overtones beamed at me, so I hear a sound with more air and snap than I would if the speaker was pointing parallel to the floor. This makes a BIG difference to my appreciation of the “tones” I’m setting up on the HX Effects.
I have one Preset with nothing in it, to send the guitar output unchanged to the amp, but despite that the sound through the HX Effects sounds a little tighter and snappier. I’m assuming that the ADC-in / DAC-out conversion, plus any other system circuitry in this “empty path” through the HX Effects, creates some compression. I’m not complaining. It has given me back the neck pickup, which sounded too snarly and nasal through the Katana.
Okay… set-up over. Actual tone-chasing next.
Imagine being dropped in a guitar shop, given the keys to the pedal cabinet and told to play around all your like. That’s what getting an HX Effects is.
I’m playing it through the Katana, (edit: 9/6) using the Instrument In, pre-amp gain at zero, pre-amp volume nearly dimed, Mid-EQ dimed, Treble and Bass at 12:00. The power amp is set at “0.5W” (/edit) and I control the output with the Master volume.
I’m playing mostly between 65-75 dBA, and have made the following very important adjustment to the amp positioning.
I sit on a barstool about two metres away, on a chair about a meter away, depending on whether I’m using the HX Edit program.
Brief acoustics digression. When the wavelength of a note is less than the diameter of the speaker, that note and those above it will start to “beam” out of the speaker. For a 12” speaker, that frequency is around 1100 Hz, which is about the highest note on the guitar. BUT, guitar strings produce a lot of overtones - fifths and octaves - which are not a lot quieter than the fundamental tone - so that playing A440 produces second harmonics of 1,760 Hz, which will go out like a lightbeam from a big speaker (okay, there are lobes to the side, but only if you’re doing a science degree). Stand to one side or above the speaker and those higher harmonics will pass you right by: the sound will be smoother and lack bite. What I heard over at my friend’s place, where we sit with our heads at speaker level, were all those higher harmonics, which gave the impression of bite and air. This is why mic-ing speakers is more of an art than it should be: where you put the mic affects what exact mix of overtones and bass notes you get.
Chasing tone is to acoustics what cooking is to chemistry: there’s a science underneath it, but mostly it’s applied magic.
The towel under the front of the speaker means I get the overtones beamed at me, so I hear a sound with more air and snap than I would if the speaker was pointing parallel to the floor. This makes a BIG difference to my appreciation of the “tones” I’m setting up on the HX Effects.
I have one Preset with nothing in it, to send the guitar output unchanged to the amp, but despite that the sound through the HX Effects sounds a little tighter and snappier. I’m assuming that the ADC-in / DAC-out conversion, plus any other system circuitry in this “empty path” through the HX Effects, creates some compression. I’m not complaining. It has given me back the neck pickup, which sounded too snarly and nasal through the Katana.
Okay… set-up over. Actual tone-chasing next.
Friday, 3 May 2024
Geoff Marshall
There are transport nerds, and then there’s Geoff Marshall. He’s at Dovey Junction in this video. It’s about passing loops and platform lengths, and where the station entrance is. This what I watch when I’m having supper. It’s so soothing.
Tuesday, 30 April 2024
Angela Collier
That would be Doctor Angela to you, though she’s working in the private sector. She has a mug with a proton on one side and a hydrogen ion on the other, because that’s a joke about physicists and chemists (it’s the same thing). She’s darn good at explaining science stuff and isn’t afraid to throw math at you, because of course you math, right? This is a good explanation of temperature, but be warned, the explanation involves entropy.
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