Upside down noise (Fred Wightman )

Subject: Upside down noise
From:    Fred Wightman  <Wightman(at)WAISMAN.WISC.EDU>
Date:    Thu, 6 Aug 1998 08:00:09 -0500

Dear List:

I would like to make a plea to list posters to think a little before
posting. The "noise" on this list has grown to the point where many of us
who take auditory research seriously ignor the list altogether.

The post from Bates about inverting the phase of a sinusoid at each ear is
a good example of posting before thinking. Surely, Mr. Bates did not mean
to suggest that if the output of an oscillator is fed to two inverters, and
the outputs of those inverters to the two ears, there would result strange
and amazing percepts! This would be quite silly, since such a condition
could surely not be distinguished from the condition without the inverters
in the circuit. What is probably meant is that one ear is inverted with
respect to the other. As frequency is swept, the 180 degree interaural
phase difference would probably be interpreted by the brain as a frequency
dependent interaural time difference, creating some sort of spatial effect.

Fred Wightman

McGill is running a new version of LISTSERV (1.8c on Windows NT). 
Information is available on the WEB at http://www.mcgill.ca/cc/listserv