Subject: Re: Granular synthesis and auditory segmentation From: "Richard J. Fabbri" <fabbri(at)NETAXIS.COM> Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 11:27:24 -0400Dear 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 Email to AUDITORY should now be sent to AUDITORY(at)lists.mcgill.ca LISTSERV commands should be sent to listserv(at)lists.mcgill.ca Information is available on the WEB at http://www.mcgill.ca/cc/listserv