You remember the dying days of the last Fianna Fáil-led coalition? The days in January 2011 when a handful of ministers resigned, and Taoiseach Brian Cowen carried out a reshuffle by reassigning their portfolios to ministers who had stayed?

After the retirement of Séamus Crimmins as executive director of RTÉ’s orchestras, quartet and choirs, the national broadcaster seemed to take a leaf out of that book. It added to the workload of Aodán Ó Dubhghaill, head of RTÉ Lyric FM, by appointing him interim executive director until a new appointment is made.

Why such a bleak interpretation of the status quo? Well, I asked RTÉ about the timescale for recruiting a new executive director, to be told “HR are already heavily committed in terms of resources for the next couple of months, but we would hope to address this appointment in the autumn.” HR must be even more burdened than this would suggest, as Crimmins gave RTÉ notice of his retirement in early April.

I also asked about progress on the appointment of a new string quartet, which has been carried out by a tendering process, with the successful ensemble due to start work in the first quarter of 2014. The official reply was that “the closing date for tenders was the end of June.  The applications are currently under review so no award of contract has been made at this stage.”

The closing date was actually June 7th, the award of contract was due this month, and you can just imagine how the quartets that entered are keeping their 2014 diaries clear should they be so lucky as to get the new appointment.

In Cowen's defence, at least he acted quickly. Small wonder that the Minister for Communications, Pat Rabbitte, should have commissioned a report into the scope for new efficiencies at RTÉ.

Listening with our eyes
An article by Ivan Hewett in the Daily Telegraph brought Dr Chiah-Jung Tsay and her research to my attention. The newspaper headline said it all: "In music, the eyes matter as much as the ears." Her paper is available on the website of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (pnas.org), under the headline "Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance".

The research has nothing to do with visual communication between musicians during the act of performance. It concerns a series of tests to see whether ordinary folk can match the juries of various music competitions with winners when given samples of competitors’ performances.

What makes both the research and its conclusions remarkable is that the people taking part in the tests made both sound-only and video-only assessments, and the video-only assessments turned out to be more accurate in reflecting the expert juries’ actual verdicts.

If you seek out the published paper, you might have your breath taken away by the bluntness of the conclusions. You will read that “the findings demonstrate that people actually depend primarily on visual information when making judgments about music performance.

“People reliably select the actual winners of live music competitions based on silent video recordings, but neither musical novices nor professional musicians were able to identify the winners based on sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound. The results highlight our natural, automatic, and nonconscious dependence on visual cues.”

The conclusion reads: “The dominance of visual information emerges to the degree that it is overweighted relative to auditory information, even when sound is consciously valued as the core domain content.”

Dig down a bit, and you might be even more surprised. Much of the research was carried out using samples just six seconds long. But the task was made a lot easier by the fact that the compared samples covered only the players who landed the top three places. Never mind. Who would have predicted that anyone would be more likely to guess the actual winner from the top three at any music competition, using a silent video rather than a sound recording of the playing?

Some visual experiments
Still, there are abundant hints that extra-musical knowledge and information – including visual appearances – play a role far greater than is generally acknowledged in making musical assessments. I'll never forget sitting at a press lunch beside Deborah Borda, now executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when she was the boss of the New York Philharmonic, and hearing her tell of what transpired when that orchestra first introduced blind auditions.

The pressure, she explained, had come from black musicians, who felt that their paltry presence in the orchestra had more to do with their skin colour than their skills. You can find historical documents relating to the issue in the New York Phil’s digital archive (archives.nyphil.org).

After the orchestra reformed its procedures so that candidates could no longer be seen by auditioning panels, there was indeed a change in who was hired. But it wasn’t the result that might have been expected. The big leap in new hirings, Borda told me, was among women.

And, leaving all prejudice aside, when you delve down into the business of how the brain processes what you hear, the situation is, if anything, even more complex than the processing of written language. Remember the famous triangle with the words Paris in the Spring, with an extra definite article that you don’t register?

Another example: “THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mtt.aer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.” You get the point. And the ear is no more a literal organ than the eye.

Of course, if people "depend primarily on visual information when making judgments about music performance", why does anyone ever listen to the radio, or music on an iPod? There's a listenership of billions out there saying that Dr Tsay has somehow missed a large part of the story.
mdervan@irishtimes.com