Subject: Re: About importance of "phase" in sound recognition From: Laszlo Toth <tothl@xxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2010 14:56:58 +0200 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Kevin Austin wrote: > When I first learned that phase was not important to hearing, it was in > a specific context. It was, (for example) with a sawtooth wave, invert > it. It will sound the same, even though it is 180° out of phase. > Therefore [?] the phase of the signal can be shifted by 180° (or > inverted), and the ear is insensitive to this. Interestingly, a parallel thread is running on the music-dsp mailing list just about the same topic. You can find the archive here: http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/music-dsp/2010-October.txt In particular, Sampo Syreeni wrote: "But perhaps the most shocking discovery here is that with sufficiently large test sets, 180 degree phase differences can be distinguished at a statistically significant level, monaurally only. That I think was what lead to the periodicity/rectifier models of pitch perception in the first place, long before e.g. missing fundamental kind of phenomena were propertly attributed to the nonlinearity of the cochlear cilia."