Subject: Re: About importance of "phase" in sound recognition From: Laszlo Toth <tothl@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 14:21:56 +0200 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, ita katz wrote: > I think that the distinction between signals which have or do not have phase > is not binary - it is a gradual transition between the two, since the > question 'when is a signal (semi) periodic?' does not have one answer, not > mathematically and not psychoanalytically - A sinosuid of .5 a period is > clearly not periodic, but a sinosuid of 100 periods clearly is - where is > the transition between the 'periodic' and 'non-periodic'? it is not a > point-transition. Matematically a function f is periodic if f(x)=f(x+p) for some p>0 for ALL values of x. So _mathematically_ your argument is clearly incorrect. It is another thing that I understand your argument and admit that it would make sense to have same more practical, "pschychoacoustic" definition of "periodic" and "phase". But my feeling is that such a definition does not exist, and this causes confusion. Laszlo Toth Hungarian Academy of Sciences * Research Group on Artificial Intelligence * "Failure only begins e-mail: tothl@xxxxxxxx * when you stop trying" http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/~tothl *