On 5/25/06, Charles Henry czhenry@gmail.com wrote:
By phase-locked pulses, do you mean that the hair-cell trigger happens at the same point in each cycle, and so the resulting pulses correlate to the same phase for each vibration? If you mean something else, it's probably not worth trying to explain. But please do.
yes, I *think* they are phase-locked, meaning that it happens at the same phase per oscillation. I would not know if it is one or two action potentials per period or at what point they are triggered, but the auto correlation of the auditory nerve bundles shows strong correlations at the period of oscillation...implies phase-locked...but that's all I got.
Makes sense. There must be a threshold for how much pressure it takes to trigger a hair cell, and a steady periodic vibration would tend to hit that threshold periodically. I wonder if this has to do with why certain higher frequencies sound like they are getting higher or lower as the amplitude changes. The threshold changes phase or something.
I'm technically still in school this summer, until I complete a literature review for one class. The topic is neuroscience and auditory scene analysis.
Oh yeah, that.
I've been way too bogged down in speech readings for awhile, and I never liked studying speech much. I think that ASA is about as important of a cognitive psych theory as any...This is probably old hat, here, but has anyone read David Huron's "Tone and Voice: a derivation of the rules of voice leading from perceptual principles" in music perception? This article got me thinking about how voice leading rules and ASA go hand in hand. Or that ASA even subsumes the category of voice leading rules.
Not familiar with ASA or Huron. I have always found voice leading to be kind of a boring study, but then it's never been presented to me with any science, just conventions.
I talked about it with my advisor, and brought up an interesting idea. The exerimental protocol is just so simple, that we could do it with Pd and use only the most elementary objects. It can be run simply on any computer, then, and use Pd to log data to text files.
The big idea is to try to circulate the experiment among Pd users, and let them email the data back. Thus, we could collect a fairly large amount of data for an experiment. Of course, we run into institutional issues. If you wanted the analysis to get published somewhere, you'd have to get some kind of approval for the work and faces serious issues of reproducibility and lack of controlled environment...use headphones (non-standardized) or loudspeakers (free-field, room dependent)...a whole lot of experimental design problems...
What about keeping the data separate per headphone set? Then if there are trends that are consistent between sets, that might be even more convincing.
I started using Pd, because I had a music composition project (going on 2yrs now and still haven't finished) and Max just couldn't do what I wanted...I couldn't figure out how to create new externals for Max (probably never tried hard enough), so I switched to Pd. The composition project was to create music via stable feedback between a loudspeaker and microphone--hence I've tried to build an adaptive filter bank for fixing the LS/room/mic response. I'll get it done one of these days...
Chuck
Sounds pretty creative. That's something a multimedia major at my school would do, albeit more involved than they would probably get. Good luck with it.
-Chuckk