How Science Got Sound Wrong

We can’t see 324 megapixels ... Not even close. We can see about 7 megapixels at most at a single time in our foveal vision. That 324 is an erroneous interpretation of if we scanned our eyes over a field of view but out brains do not really work that way. We have 120 million rods but they are bundled so the resolution is not great and they easily saturate. We have approx 7 million cones which is where our high res viewing comes from.

"If you could hear what I’ve heard with my ears."

I am afraid they would double the dose.

Musical sounds for example are like words and numbers a tough nuts to crack if someone think that these are ready made nuts coming from a tree without seeing the growing dynamical potential which constitute them...Which comes first the egg or the hen?


Sounds are not understood being only object external to a subject, no more than rainbows are understood being only an  external object with a pot of gold at the end...These are phenomenon, this is a philosophical useful concept, not reducible to the concept of object...

One of the greatest conductor and maestro of the last century, is a mathematician by formation, Ernest Ansermet, and he wrote a book of 1 thousand two hundred pages about musical sound perception...There is explained the irreducible depth of the perception-creation of musical sound that transcend the acoustical phenomenon because the body-consciousness is implicated....Good read...

I stumble on to a description of the author of this article unknown to me on the net,
and this author seems to me not a complete moron...I am happy that this description confirm my lecture impression...

«William Softky is a biophysicist who was among the first neuroscientists to understand microtiming, and among the first technologists to build that understanding into algorithms. Thousands have cited his scientific work, his PhD in Theoretical Physics is from Caltech, his name is on 10 patents and two of the companies he inspired were acquired for $160 million total.»

Perhaps after all it is necessary to read his article a second time before discrediting him about a minor point compared to his main thesis....

For me learning to read is precisely that, reading 2 times, the first time the tree always mask the forest, the second time we are ready to see the forest forgetting some obfuscating tree...


Reading is even more painful to begin with and at the end than most people think ….  :)

Can't agree with you Mahgister. Whole premise of the article was that digitized systems only have timing accuracy to a sampling rate level and hence miss micro-timing. That is a 100% false premise. Digitized systems with high SNR have very high timing resolution as long as the system is bandwidth limited which digital audio is ... And so is our auditory system.  As was pointed out above, neurons don't simply fire on/off either.