Possible Errors

What possible non-logic based errors could there be? Well the equipment obviously has limitations. The microphone picks up background noise regardless of what any mortal man can do to stop it. If you filter the background noise, you also will filter out the lower end harmonics of the tone that you are recording, and if you don't filter the noise then the lower end harmonics look muddled and are distorted simply by the fact that the background noise exists at all.

What's more is that the microphone will not always pick up an entire sound. It also tends to clip the ends off of the louder sounds. Bright sounds do tend to be both loud and edgy, therefore the microphone will make the tones sound and look canned rather than giving a wholly accurate picture of the sounds.

It is also difficult to tell if the simple order that the musicians were asked to play their tones in might have an effect on their tone. If a bright tone were played after the dark tone, it is possible that the musician's interpretation of exactly what a bright or dark tone is might have changed.

The final possible error is that humans had to judge what sounds were brighter than others. A given tone played with no reference may sound a variety of different ways to different performers. Certainly extremely bright sounds will normally be indentified as such, as will extremely dark ones. Where those in the middle fall, however, is often difficult to discern and based more on the individual player's judgement than the raw data able to be collected by any computer.

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