Big Data of Sounds

Hearing begins with the ears, but it's more than the sum of sounds. We are able to recognize piano notes and experience music, understand speech in noisy surroundings and localize voice in 3D.  Is it because the sound transmitted to the inner ear is broken down into frequencies and mapped onto the brain like musical notes are mapped on a piano keyboard? But are not we able to hear different things at once in three dimensions? Are not we translating frequencies into meanings on the fly, processing Big Data better than any famous statistician? As Jacob Oppenheim and Marcelo Magnasco showed that simple decomposition of sounds into its components by Fourier transform loses important information about the sound's duration, something that our brain is actually able to overcome. Humans can beat the limits of Fourier analysis, and the Brain processes the big data of sounds better than existing algorithms do. As a matter of fact, training our brain on music makes us better in math and problem solving skills. While inability to process signals in the brain leads to developmental disorders. More to discover, more to learn.

REFERENCES

Oppenheim, Jacob N., and Marcelo O. Magnasco. "Human Time-Frequency Acuity Beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle." arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.4611(2012).

Díaz, Begoña, et al. "Dysfunction of the auditory thalamus in developmental dyslexia." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.34 (2012): 13841-13846.

The Ear Blog

Welcome to the Ear Blog!

Hearing has always been the Cinderella of the senses, but we can't undermine its importance. Among all the senses, this is the one we are most likely to lose.
The fascinating world of the inner ear consists of the smallest bones, spirals and fluid-field channels, along with tiny sensory units called hair cells. We are born with about 15,000 of them in each ear, and are subjecting these remarkable structures to constant damage from drugs, iPods, many other silence-disrupting technologies, even diets and aging. We'll talk more about it in other bloglications, meanwhile see these animations by TheatricalDesign or play with this one by adjusting the frequency of the sound entering the ear and watch youtube videos.