The medieval composers of polytextual motets have been charged with rendering multiple texts inaudible by superimposing them. While the limited contemporary evidence provided by Jacobus’s comments in the Speculum musicae seems at first sight to suggest that medieval listeners would have had trouble understanding texts declaimed simultaneously, closer scrutiny reveals the opposite: that intelligibility was desirable, and linked to modes of performance. This article explores the ways in which 20th-century performance aesthetics and recording technologies have shaped current ideas about the polytextual motet. Recent studies in cognitive psychology suggest that human ability to perform auditory scene analysis—to focus on a given sound in a complicated auditory environment—is enhanced by directional listening and relatively dry acoustics. But the modern listener often encounters motets on recordings with heavy mixing and reverb. Furthermore, combinations of contrasting vocal timbres, which can help differentiate simultaneously sung texts, are precluded by a blended, uniform sound born jointly of English choirschool culture and modernist preferences propagated under the banner of authenticity. Scholarly accounts of motets that focus on sound over sense are often influenced, directly or indirectly, by such mediated listening. Volume 23, Number 2, June 2017 Copyright © 2017 Society for Music Theory [0.1] The growth of commercial aviation in the 1950s brought with it a new problem for air-traffic controllers. Presented with the voices of multiple pilots emanating from one loudspeaker, they had trouble segregating these simultaneous streams of information, and found themselves at risk of misunderstanding important messages. Their difficulties led to the first research on what has since been termed the “cocktail party effect” or “cocktail party problem”—the isolation of one soundsource in the presence of many. The brains of most humans, and many animals, are able to

中文翻译：

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可理解性 Redux

多文本经文的中世纪作曲家被指控通过叠加多个文本来使它们听不见。虽然雅各布斯在 Speculum musicae 中的评论所提供的有限当代证据乍一看似乎表明中世纪的听众在理解同时宣读的文本时会遇到困难，但更仔细的审查却显示出相反的情况：可理解性是可取的，并且与表演模式有关。本文探讨了 20 世纪的表演美学和录音技术如何塑造了当前关于多文本格言的想法。最近的认知心理学研究表明，定向聆听和相对干燥的声学增强了人类执行听觉场景分析的能力——在复杂的听觉环境中专注于给定的声音。但是现代听众经常在大量混音和混响的录音中遇到格言。此外，可以帮助区分同时演唱的文本的对比音色的组合被英国合唱学校文化和现代主义偏好共同产生的混合统一声音所排除，这种声音在真实性的旗帜下传播。注重声音而不是感觉的经节的学术描述经常直接或间接地受到这种中介聆听的影响。第 23 卷，第 2 期，2017 年 6 月 版权所有 © 2017 音乐理论协会 [0.1] 1950 年代商业航空的发展为空中交通管制员带来了新问题。面对从一个扬声器发出的多个飞行员的声音，他们难以分离这些同时发生的信息流，并发现自己有误解重要信息的风险。他们的困难导致了对后来被称为“鸡尾酒会效应”或“鸡尾酒会问题”的第一项研究——在许多声源存在的情况下隔离一个声源。大多数人类和许多动物的大脑都能够