Appreciating the little things - Rush Hour + Joshua Bell + The Washington Post = not an experiment

This video and the the description that accompanies it on YouTube tell the story of how Joshua Bell (a famous violinist who played to a sold out audience the night before) played Bach on a $3.5 million violin in a Subway at Rush hour and almost nobody noticed.

It is presented as an experiment, which you might be able to justify if you incorrectly defined an experiment as doing something and checking to see what happened without worrying about why it happened, with astounding results. However what is truly remarkable is that it is neither an experiment nor an event with astounding results. Here's why:

It's not an experiment

In an experiment you try to test an idea. You do this by carefully adjusting one variable in a situation at a time while holding everything else constant. In an experiment you are in control and you measure the effect that changes you make to one thing (say the price of the violin in this case) have on the measure that you are interested in (people's tendency to stop and listen). Here's why the situation they describe is, at best, an awful experiment or, most accurately, an anecdotal observation

A comparison is made between the people in the Subway and the people in the concert hall the previous night. It is noted that those in the Concert Hall sat and listened intently to the performance while those in the subway did not. The reasons for this difference is suggested to be that when we don't have time to appreciate beauty we don't appreciate it. While this is possible it is by no means proven and this 'experiment' is incapable of addressing this idea. Why? It has failed to control for, and therefore has failed to rule out, the 4 following potential explanations among many others:

1) The audience
The people in the Subway and the people in the concert hall are, in all likelihood, not the same people. As such there are any number of potential reasons for them not stopping to listen to the music. While the fact that it is rush hour may be one of these other plausible explanations include a different taste in music, a dislike of subway stations (reducing the total beauty content of the situation), and even a higher proportion of deaf people (deaf people are unlikely to be well represented at a concert). These are just a few reasons.

2) The beauty signals
Those attending the concert the night before would have been given all kinds of signals about how beautiful they should think the music was. For one thing they probably knew what was going to be played, who was going to play it, and how much they had to pay for a ticket. The combination of all these branding elements sends a stronger signal to pay attention to what is happening than a guy standing in casual dress in a subway station does. As such it is entirely possible that it wasn't the time pressure that stopped people perceiving the beauty but the fact that the performance itself may have less beauty in it than we would otherwise expect.

3) The measure doesn't match the conclusion
This one is actually the most important of the bunch. While the authors talk about our inability to notice beauty this is not what they actually measured. They didn't stop anyone and ask if they noticed the music and, if so, what they thought of it. They measured the length of time people stopped for and the amount of money they placed in the violinist's case.

4) The change in sound Quality
A quiet concert hall sounds far different to a busy subway station at rush hour. If people were less likely to notice the beautiful music in the subway station it could be because it was less audible over the surrounding noise or it could even be that the acoustics of the station itself made the music sound less beautiful. This failure to control the quality of what your testing with is a fatal flaw.

It's not actually surprising

While the reasons I have outlined above are probably enough to convince anyone that the experiment performed by the Washington Post was destined to succeed in finding a difference between the number of people listening to a violinist play a piece in a concert hall and the number of people listening to the same violinist playing in a subway there are a number of other things to keep in mind. These findings are well established through strong experimental testing but are somewhat less sexy than a violinist in a subway when addressed in isolation.

1) The best predictor of whether someone will stop for someone else is whether they are in a hurry or not
There is a famous psychological experiment that pitted priests in training against the general public. Who would be the most likely to stop and help someone in need? As it turns out, whichever person was not in a hurry. Stopping then appears to be a function of hurry.

2) Conformity
Like it or not we try not to be special unique snowflakes. Instead we try to fit in with what everyone else is doing. If everyone else at the concert is listening to the musician so do we. If everyone else is ignoring him and trying to get to work, so do we. We even engage in behaviours that run completely opposite to our own beliefs.

3) Schemas
We tend to act the way we think we should act in any given situation. In a subway we think we should be in transit so we travel from point A to point B. When in a concert hall we think we should listen attentively to the music and appreciate its beauty even if we don't really know what that means. When we see someone dressed casually playing in a subway with no indicators of importance we take this to mean that they are a busker. When we see someone dressed well in a concert hall we take this to mean they are a professional. As such behaviour doesn't really give much of a clue as to what we think of the music or whether we notice. It is probably a better indicator of how we think we should behave.

4) Most people are useless at discriminating between high and low quality unless they have specialist knowledge.
Note in the description of the video they seem to suggest that the violin should be beautiful and produce beautful music because it costs $3.5 million. If we recorded music from that violin and a cheaper violin under equal controlled conditions and presented it to the author of the article and a few hundred other people without telling them which was which do you think they would be able to tell the difference? In most cases the answer would be no. This does not suggest that we can't identify beautiful music in a Subway station because it's in a subway station. Instead it suggests we can't tell the difference between beautiful music and non-beautiful music unless we are told that the music will be beautiful or not beautiful. If it's being played in a concert hall we are likely to think it must be beautiful because the setting tells us so. If it is being played in a subway we might think the person playing it is quite talented but, because they're in a subway, obviously they're not that talented and the music then can't be that beautiful.

Taking these factors into account the results are not surprising in the least and also do not suggest that rushing it what causes us to miss beauty. It may mean we are less likely to stop but that is not the same as saying that we do not notice it.

Maybe their results just mean that Bach being played on a 3.5 million dollar violin isn't actually that beautiful to most people

That is an equally valid interpretation of the same data. This time instead of blaming the public for being too busy I'm blaming the classical music crowd for being out of touch. Instead of saying "Aha! When people are in a hurry they don't notice beauty" I have said "Aha! When people have nothing else to do and have paid to listen to music that they like enough to pay money for they are more likely to listen to that music".

He Who Guards the Fire - A Song By Dennis Liu

This song, or perhaps my interpretation of it, made me cry. It did this by making me think of the relationship between a father and a son as they and their relationship developed and aged to the point that one of them, the father, passes on. It is full of metaphors - many of which I'm sure I don't entirely follow but all of which I enjoy because of the possible interpretations they raise - I am particularly fond of the reference to an evergreen forest which, to me, suggests a desire to preserve the relationship or some golden aspect of it in a way that it never changes.

Gripes:

The lyrics feel a bit thesaurus-y at times and the odd line feels a bit out of place or unnecessary. While I really like the idea of echoes being more frightening than the sound of any beast I'm not convinced that the clarification of the reason that they are frightening is necessary, this explanatory line also lengthens the verse to the point where it becomes out of step with the others. Personally I feel that the echoes here are the sound of silence/the absence of the father. The explanation of why they are frightening runs counter to this though suggesting that it is what the echoes tell or have the potential to tell our narrator something about himself that is frightening, the echoes serve as a mirror.

In writing this I am talking myself round a bit. This is something I am always wary of when talking about something that is feeling based rather than fact based as it means I've pushing myself away from thinking with feelings and towards thinking with thoughts. That move feels dangerous. That being said that additional line could suggest to us that our narrator has not lived up to the expectations he has set for himself through his time with his father. This is very different from simply being alone in that it also reflects some sense of failure and/or disappointment.

How Could We Be? - A song by Dennis Liu

Dennis has been a friend for a while now.When I first met him I got the impression that he was something of a force to be reckoned with in the university's film group. Later I learnt that his talents extended to music as well.

Photo by Aaron Goodwin

While I know very little about music (I have actually said things like "I don't know what to call them, so I'm going to say... notes?") as a general rule I like his work. In fact my wife and I were lucky enough to have him play at our wedding during the bridal entrance and the signing of the register and we have a few of his EPs from a few years back. These days he has taken to releasing tracks online via bandcamp.

Like all of us he's continuing to develop his skills and talent - currently he's doing this by writing songs and recording them onto cassette tapes.

What follows are my impressions of 'How Could We Be'. I write them in the belief that providing or receiving honest opinions can be a great way to develop skills in yourself or others any area. As always though, when considering opinions, its important to consider the source and this source is not very well informed. Feel free to join me as I stab wildly in the dark.

Initial Impressions:

The song is soft and gentle, more suited to an intimate performance with people sitting and listening than dancing and singing along. If anyone is dancing in this fantasy land of mine they're damn good at it and their movements are slow and formal with the occasional step filling in a blank spot in the music. That being said it does seem to have an underlying - and slightly unusually paced - driving beat to it. It stops and starts in a fashion that draws you in while preventing any easy exaggerated seated rocking movements or lighter waving (thankfully). At points, such as the beginning and near the midpoint, the drawing-in highlights the lyrics. This in interesting in the sense that without these pauses, once the song had gotten under way, I found my attention wandering from the words of the lyrics to the tone of the lyrics. While I still heard the words the voice became less of a voice and more of an instrument - it accompanied the guitar rather than the other way around.

Grumps:

Personally I'm not a fan of the cassette recording. I'm not sure if it's intended as an aesthetic thing (akin to the vinyl is better argument), an authenticity thing (the need to get things right in one hit), a convenience factor (reduced post work), some kind of limitation to encourage enhanced creativity, or something else entirely but it doesn't work for me. The crackle in the silence is more distracting than charming. Chances are that doesn't matter though, chances are the recording medium isn't designed to impress me, chances are it's something that works for him for one of the earlier reasons or an entirely different one and, at the end of the day, that's all that matters.