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The journey from tiny atmospheric vibrations to perceiving something like speech or music is as improbable and absurd as any biological adaptation of the animal

The journey from tiny atmospheric vibrations to perceiving something like speech or music is as improbable and absurd as any biological adaptation of the animal kingdom. The basic, undifferentiated cell functions (including dna encoding etc), while extraordinary, still feel like robust and fairly close to physical-anorganic processes. Once cells start differentiating and creating these long chains of bizarre mechano-electro-biological contraptions one wonders what sort of weird and wonderfull phase space has been tapped. I wish there would be more detail about the final neuronal stages, perception of pitch (octaves), timbre, rhythm, direction, volume etc.

strogonoff 3y ago
Iain McGilchrist touches on music perception in The Master and His Emissary, as far as it concerns the main thesis of the book (which is primarily about our two sub-minds—brain hemispheres—and their different modes of attending to the world).
jsenn 3y ago
The books Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale [1] and Rhythm and Transforms [2] by Sethares have a lot of detail about the perception of higher level phenomena like pitch and rhythm. Plus he's an electrical engineer, so you get some code out of the deal. He doesn't dwell too much on the neuroscience aspect though--in both cases he's after a more functional explanation. [1] https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html [2] https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/RT.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/RT.html
achileas 3y ago
The paper doesn't even cover the intermediate neuronal stages in the brainstem, which are extremely important for localization and detecting of different features of sound - in fact several of those are well characterized in the brainstem. Your brainstem can detect level and timing differences for a sound for incoming sounds from each ear (interaural level and interaural time differences), depending on the frequency of the sound, and uses that for localization. As for the improbability - it makes perfect sense when you think of each layer being some sort of improvement on the previous layer(s) rather than a well-engineered preplanned system.

strogonoff 3y ago

Iain McGilchrist touches on music perception in The Master and His Emissary, as far as it concerns the main thesis of the book (which is primarily about our two sub-minds—brain hemispheres—and their different modes of attending to the world).

jsenn 3y ago

The books Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale [1] and Rhythm and Transforms [2] by Sethares have a lot of detail about the perception of higher level phenomena like pitch and rhythm. Plus he's an electrical engineer, so you get some code out of the deal. He doesn't dwell too much on the neuroscience aspect though--in both cases he's after a more functional explanation. [1] https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html [2] https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/RT.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/RT.html

achileas 3y ago

The paper doesn't even cover the intermediate neuronal stages in the brainstem, which are extremely important for localization and detecting of different features of sound - in fact several of those are well characterized in the brainstem. Your brainstem can detect level and timing differences for a sound for incoming sounds from each ear (interaural level and interaural time differences), depending on the frequency of the sound, and uses that for localization. As for the improbability - it makes perfect sense when you think of each layer being some sort of improvement on the previous layer(s) rather than a well-engineered preplanned system.