4 ms·
The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a patter
by codeulike 7y ago
The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you.
Something quite intruiging - to me - about sound (and in particular music and speech) is that it is spread across time. At any one instant of frozen time, nothing in particular is happening with a sound - this is different to vision, where if you imagine freezing time, you get a still image. So the way sound is processed before it reaches the level of consciousness must need some kind of time buffer. So when, say, you are appreciating a drum pattern in a piece of music, your brain is processing the last few seconds of sound, noticing and highlighting the patterns and then presenting it to your consciousness as a kindof rhythmic artifact that you can appreciate and anticipate while it is still happening.
- neohaven 7y agoIf you freeze video, you get an image. If you freeze sound, you get an "image" on the speaker. It "stays" where it is. (At the voltage potential it is.) We put HPFs on subwoofers so they don't stay offset like that. The same way vision in human sight makes very little sense without things being able to move (integration over time), hearing in the human sense seems to be the same. Recording the change in pressure over time of the surrounding air, instead of photons hitting you. But I am pretty certain that "vision" that works in "single blips" with no refresh is just as pointless as a paused audio recording for survival of an animal.
- ses1984 7y agoWhy would you put a high pass filter on a subwoofer?
- michaelgrafl 7y agoTo eliminate DC Offset (i.e. 0Hz).
- hprotagonist 7y agoThe Jeffress model (lateral delay lines) mostly addresses some of this—specifically azimuth localization. The precortical processing in the auditory system is, in general, quite intricate; we’re finding out new tricks every day. Vision is too, of course — and is like two orders slower!
- ses1984 7y agoA frozen image is still an integration over time. If you could really freeze an image from a very small instant of time approaching zero, it wouldn't look like you expect. Light oscillates just like sound. Anyway you can take a "still image" of sound, you can apply a Fourier transform.
- takeda 7y agoI don't think that there is much difference with vision compared to sound. If you would truly froze time (not like they do in movies) you similarly wouldn't see anything.
- TaupeRanger 7y agoThe brain requires change/pattern for anything to reach consciousness. A "frozen" image is still oscillating light on your photoreceptors. Your brain is always incorporating some kind of memory or recent change with every experience you have...sound isn't special.
- whatshisface 7y agoThe oscillations of the light you see is on the tetrahertz scale, and goes nowhere close to being perceived as changing by your brain. Your rods and cones don't directly measure the electric or magnetic field vectors, they interact chemically with individual photons.
- TaupeRanger 7y agoYou completely missed the point. The oscillation of incoming photons is what allows the photoreceptors to send distinguishable patterns to the brain. You can say that the oscillation "starts" in the light waves or in the chemical reactions. It doesn't matter - the point was that vision requires change just like audition.
- lozf 7y agoIndeed, but we can consider even shorter chunks of time than the last few seconds... Frequency itself is fundamentally dependent on time, e.g. The lowest 'A(0)' note on a piano vibrating at 27.5Hz = "cycles-per-second", up through "Concert Pitch" tuning reference 'A(4)' at 440Hz, and doubling in speed and pitch each octave upwards. I'm often similarly intrigued / amazed / bemused that without time, we'd have no concept of sound.