[macrae11]

Hi John

I wanted to take some time to read through and attempt to fully understand the papers that you presented however there are still some things that I'm not convinced of from your arguments. In your first article that you posted I don't see it directly referring to integration time. It does mention 50 ms, as that is the rough time where humans start to get out of the Haas effect. (Actually the Haas effect is around 30-40 ms) In attempting to model human hearing, they eliminated peaks that were closer than 50 ms, because they are stating that they aren't heard and there for aren't relevant. I do find it interesting that they don't keep the first detected peak, even though that could potentially be the peak that humans would “hear”.

Also they state that sounds with slow attacks are not represented well by this algorithm they created. Since almost all sounds that fall in the frequencies we're discussing have a slow attack time, I think this article is more or less irrelevant in this discussion.

The second and third articles seem to have less to do with our discussion albeit they had some interesting reading. They are quite long however, and I can't state that I explicitly understood every single paragraph that was written. If there is a specific section to support your case, then perhaps you could point it out to me.

In the third article it seems to me to state that temporal integration doesn't have anything to do with a delay of sensation at various frequencies but rather a variation of sensation based on the duration of tones.

According my understanding of your hypothesis of “gate time” there would be a noticeable delay of lower frequencies from higher frequencies. I'm just guess here, but if you're saying that there's a 50ms “gate time” at 40Hz, than it might be logical to assume that there is a 100ms gate time at 20Hz, and a 25ms gate time at 80Hz?

Using this assumption, I consider the proposition quite preposterous. From listening experience I can with great certainty say, there is no noticeable delay of lower frequencies as my understanding of gate time seems to imply.

If I am changing your words to mean something different than what you intended, please point out my flaws in reasoning.


In regards to the first part of your post, you claim that humans need to hear an entire cycle, or at least a half cycle of a waveform in order to identify it. To my understanding I don't believe this is true. I tried to find some research to this effect, but haven't found what I was looking for as of yet.

I do propose a real world situation though. If humans need to hear an entire cycle of a waveform would they be able to hear low frequencies in headphones. Obviously the size of waveforms are far to large to reside in the space between a headphone and an eardrum. Now I know your response to this, is that the waves would go through their pressure variances, from compression to rarefaction in that space without the full waveform being present at any one time. This still presents the problem, that the waves of lower frequencies would be heard later in reference to higher frequencies, resulting in a glissando effect with everything we heard. Hearing high frequencies and then having the low frequencies be heard later in time. In order to hear 20Hz there would have to be a delay of approximately 50ms causing a discreet delay. (I think this might be a more accurate measurement to use for “gate time” since a 20Hz wave has a wavelength of approximately 17 metres, which would take approximately 50ms to propogate.)

I don't believe there is such a delay although I am going to conduct my own listening tests to determine if I am correct or not.

As it is, I'm going to be on location all of next week, so I probably won't be able to respond to any of your responses, although I will try to read them, and then respond next weeknd.

Thanks for this interesting and entertaining debate. I am certainly learning some new things, and stretching my brain in ways that it hasn't been stretched since I was in school.

Cheers

Andrew