I have posted this link in a similar thread, but think it might be worth reposting here with some key quotes below. For context, this review article discusses experiments demonstrating that violinists preferred modern violins to the priceless 17th/18th century Italian violins in the context of a double-blind, controlled study -
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1405851111
“Why is it that musicians and scientists reach different conclusions when considering the same data? This arises in part due to different ways of knowing things. Scientists know what they know through systematic observation of the external world, mediated by replicable experiments and objective measurement. Artists know what they know through emotional experience, subjectivity, and intuition. When they disagree, each appeals to his or her own internally stable and coherent system. Scientists embrace rationality; artists cite the ineffability of experience and the limits of scientific knowledge. However, it would be a mistake to say that scientists' way of knowing is superior. Scientists haven't written
Messiah or
The Rite of Spring.Artists' intuitions and the meandering, nonlinear path of inspiration yield results that could not have been gotten any other way.”
“Some musicians espouse decidedly nonscientific views, such as the existence of spirit guides (
3) or the idea that certain musical instruments are superior to others based on their age and heritage, who built them, and who played them previously. So famous is one line of old violins that the word Stradivarius has entered the popular lexicon. Students and amateur musicians everywhere, at some point in their lives, have harbored the thought that if only they could get their hands on such a masterpiece instrument, they would sound like their musical heroes. However, Fritz et al. clearly demonstrate that these venerated older instruments are indistinguishable from well-made contemporary ones.
What's going on then? Why does the folk belief that old instruments sound better persist? A cognitive explanation is that this phenomenon represents the influence of top-down processing, that is, expectation-driven perception, as opposed to stimulus-driven perception.”
“In short, simply knowing that an instrument has a certain pedigree or history could activate expectations for its sound that cause neural circuits—even lower level sensory-perceptual ones—to behave differently than they would without that knowledge. We may really believe that they sound better, even if there is no acoustic difference in the distal world.”
“Because artists rely so heavily on their own experience, studies like this have historically fallen on deaf ears—“I know what I know because my senses tell me so” may be the refrain of those who are skeptical of scientific methods. An artist's knowledge comes from his or her own subjective impressions, influenced as they are by labels and expectations, and for many reasons, we want this to be so. Art is not meant to replicate science but to recontextualize the world for us, to show us new perspectives, and to communicate emotional propositions—all things that science is not as good at doing. Although this experiment is unlikely to change many musicians' minds, Fritz et al. accomplish a great deal by meeting artists on their own terms, by conducting a study with maximal ecological validity and a minimum of “laboratory-like” distractions. For those artists who are open-minded enough to allow the scientific method in, the findings are loud and clear and should put an end to speculation and rumor and the outrageously high prices charged for musical instruments that are, even to experts we now know, indistinguishable from their less expensive counterparts.”
