On Dec 18, 2006, at 7:51 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Honestly, I doubt you could tell the difference between 4ms and 14ms in a blind test. There have been many studies on this. If you can detect such tiny differences in onset time, you would be superhuman.
Most people are superhuman until science tells them that they're not. That's why a lot of people hate science. ;)
For a tonal sound like a piano, humans perceive two sounds as one if they have an onset within 30ms of each other. Humans can perceive such tiny temporal details, but this is for timbral perception rather than onset perception.
Yes, it's easy to perceive changes of 1ms or even less, if one is playing twice exactly the same sounds at opposed phases, because you can listen to how exactly certain frequencies are getting cancelled and others not (and that's the same as hearing the size of the room in which the sound is, because both cases are the standing-wave phenomenon).
I'd guess that psychoacoustic experiments are right, if one considers only what is heard directly by the ear, but that's disregarding what can be heard by the mind (by indirect use of ears).
You can't hear what your ears hear, you can only hear what your mind perceives. The auditory processing parts of the brain do massive amounts of processing of the data that comes into the ears, discarding a lot of the data, and often waiting for more data before reporting the results to the conscious part of your brain. You can directly access your ears no more readily that you can consciously control your liver or kidneys.
These phenomenon are very apparent when you try them yourself, and most of the time, even if you are fully aware of what the actual content of the sound source actually is, you cannot change your perception.
If you really want to get deep into it, I recommend Bregman's Auditory Scene Analysis. He's the main guy who has really broken down auditory perception into its constituent parts. Here are some examples from that book:
http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/auditory/bregmancd.html
.hc
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
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