Abstract
In audition, perhaps more than in any other sense, the temporal aspects of the stimulus are crucially important for conveying information. This clearly is true of speech and of most auditory communication signals, where the temporal pattern of spectral changes is, essentially, the informational substrate. Indeed, an auditory “pattern” is seldom a fixed spectral shape; rather, it is a time varying sequence of spectral shapes. Given the fundamental importance of temporal changes in audition, it is not surprising that most auditory systems are “fast,” at least compared to other sensory systems. We can hear temporal changes in the low millisecond range. We can, for example, hear the roughness produced by periodically interrupting a broadband noise at interruption rates up to several kHz. This is several orders of magnitude faster than in vision where the analogous “flicker fusion frequency” is a sluggish 50 to 60 Hz.
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Viemeister, N.F., Plack, C.J. (1993). Time Analysis. In: Yost, W.A., Popper, A.N., Fay, R.R. (eds) Human Psychophysics. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 3. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2728-1_4
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