First report

Thank you to all supporters that donated to this project!

The experiment started in its Beta (testing) phase. We are receiving extraordinary number of visits from all around the World - on average 300-500 visits to our website (http://BrainExperiments.com) and on average 100 experiments (sound comparisons) per day.

Please see on the image below the stats of the participant recruitment campaign for the day Dec 25th, 2017:

 

Stats of the participant recruitment campaign for the day Dec 25th, 2017

Still, we are adjusting few technical details: detection if the participant is using headphones or not was the most difficult one. We have changed few approaches, and the current method is performing good, so far. We are using the difference in perception of two simultaneous sounds with a close frequency range: listening to the sound binauraly (with headphones, each sound presented to a different ear) produces a continuous-loudness sound, where monaural listening produces a quickly interrupting sound. This is a well known effect, pronounced by the 19th century German scientist Helmholtz, as a main cause for dissonance. His hypothesis was later rejected by other scientists, exactly because the mentioned interrupting (beating, as he named it) effect is not noticeable in binaural hearing.

Me, personally, I believe that this effect has a limited role in the monaural consonance/dissonance experience, and comes to an effect for two-tone intervals where the tones are in a close frequency range. Still, our project, trying to find and prove the causes for consonance emergence, for now, focuses on the neural events related to consonance.

Now, back to the project: we are still collecting data from participants in order to confirm that the experiment is technically working as expected - only then we can announce the real start.

Again, thank you for the support and interest!

Toso Pankovski