Re: Human hearing beats the Fourier uncertainty principle: Research

["Beerends, J.G. (John)" <john.beerends@xxxxxx>]

For discrimination the uncertainty limit does not exist, one can build discriminator devices that go below the uncertainty limit in both the time and frequency domain, the uncertainty limit is only a measure for the spread (Delta) in both domains (DfDt>1), it is not a limit to what extent they can be discriminated. One can also build a device that measures the frequency of a sine wave with an accuracy below the uncertainty limit by exploiting a-priori knowledge, i.e. if I know  that the signal I am measuring is a short cut out of an infinite duration sine wave of a certain amplitude I can measure the frequency as accurate as I want.

John Beerends



-----Original Message-----
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kevin Austin
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2013 5:07 PM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Human hearing beats the Fourier uncertainty principle: Research

Comments?


>> http://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html
>> 
>> 
>> (Phys.org)-For the first time, physicists have found that humans can discriminate a sound's frequency (related to a note's pitch) and timing (whether a note comes before or after another note) more than 10 times better than the limit imposed by the Fourier uncertainty principle. Not surprisingly, some of the subjects with the best listening precision were musicians, but even non-musicians could exceed the uncertainty limit. The results rule out the majority of auditory processing brain algorithms that have been proposed, since only a few models can match this impressive human performance.
>> 
>> Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html#jCp


Thanks

Kevin
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