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Re: About importance of "phase" in sound recognition



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."