Klarinet Archive - Posting 000943.txt from 2004/03

From: "Joseph Wakeling" <joseph.wakeling@------.net>
Subj: [kl] Pitch perception
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 13:38:36 -0500

Bill Hausmann wrote:

<< This could well be true. I have often wondered if the color I see as
"red" and what someone else sees as "red" are in fact the same visual image.
The other person may, in fact, see my BLUE, but since he has learned to
identify it as "red" we still both know to stop at the traffic light. >>

That wasn't really what I meant. The neural mechanisms of pitch perception
must be pretty much the same between different people (if not it would be a
major upset for biology...). Whether your conscious perception of them is
different from mine is just a philosophical point. ;-)

What I was getting at is that perceived pitch is a very different thing from
the waveform of the sound you are hearing. The waveform gets filtered
through neural mechanisms which evolved to solve very different problems, so
what we perceive is often rather different from what is "actually out
there". It emerges from the combination of the waveform with a "random
noise" process that is a much older and more fundamental part of brain
activity than the auditory system.

-- Joe

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