without having read the paper in detail, I just think the discussion should be done with fair weapons:
The description of the ear via a FFT is a rather poor model, but a FFT (or rather the math behind that) can be interpretet as a bank of overlapping bandpass filters (see the Oppenheim Schaefer DSP book)....so this point raised is not valid.
I would be surprised if this result would not have been reported before in the solid psychoacoustics literature before.
Bests
BAstian
On 02/18/2013 05:00 PM, James Johnston wrote:
I must admit some frustration with this particular paper. First, the Gabor limit does not apply to the task, and never did. The only limit here is SNR_based, since there is already expectation of a given set of frequencies, this is not a task requiring arbitrary detection. Then, the fact that the ear is a leading edge detector has been understood for roughly 100 years now, making "1/100 th of a wavelength" perhaps not such a big deal. It is nice that this performance ability by the human has been clearly demonstrated, but the headline is inexcusably misleading, and is already providing fodder for the audiophile "I told you so" bunch who simply doesn't understand what it means. And, in any case, who would use an FFT to detect such a thing? Rather use a set of bandpass filters, eh? On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Peter Meijer <feedback@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Indeed this relates to a discussion that we had 9 years ago, http://www.auditory.org/mhonarc/2004/msg00145.html and that formed the basis of my old web page on beating the frequency-time uncertainty principle, http://www.seeingwithsound.com/freqtime.htm Best regards, Peter Meijer Seeing with Sound - The vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.comDate: Sun, 17 Feb 2013 07:43:35 +0000 From: "Beerends, J.G. (John)" <john.beerends@xxxxxx> To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Human hearing beats the Fourier uncertainty principle: Research 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
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