Re: Granular synthesis and auditory segmentation

["Richard J. Fabbri" <fabbri@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear List,

John K. Bates has introduced "halfwave" grains (fragments) and,
using them, successfully auditioned synthesized speech.

I have had a similar success in a paper given at the AES (Berlin '93)
and believe that success is due to the halfwave nature of the neural
detectors within the cochlear membrane structure, i.e., the chemical
source of neural pulses is replenished during the opposite polarity
of the acoustic wave - pulse production ceases.

        ... Nature throws away half the acoustic waveform !

This halfwave nature of the cochlear neural detectors also "explains"
how we perceive Onsets of ONLY ONE POLARITY as has been noted
in many experiments - Jens Blauert has some great waveform drawings
demonstrating our Onset preference in "Spatial Hearing".

Does this set of facts make anyone wonder why we bother to sample
the WHOLE waveform and continue to apply Fourier transforms to these
Bipolar samples when Nature does Not ?!

Nature has a much simpler solution in Time Domain!

We can let Nature teach us a new path ... or, we can persist and
continue applying a transform simply because a mathematical theory
of such transforms makes analysis "simple" ... simple but, offers no
truth (in fact) to the basic sense of hearing.


Best Regards,
Richard Fabbri

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