How Science Got Sound Wrong


I don't believe I've posted this before or if it has been posted before but I found it quite interesting despite its technical aspect. I didn't post this for a digital vs analog discussion. We've beat that horse to death several times. I play 90% vinyl. But I still can enjoy my CD's.  

https://www.fairobserver.com/more/science/neil-young-vinyl-lp-records-digital-audio-science-news-wil...
artemus_5
Perhaps you will understand with a drawing...

The main thesis implicate that the reconstruction of sound experience is possible if you implicate the body not only the ears, and not only mathematical simulation of sound out of his acoustical ecosystem but the gesture of the body in the acoustical sphere of the ecosystem with his acoustical response... I forget how to draw here...:)


Here some important extract of this article for you to read and for understanding his main thesis ( beside the alleged fact of his incompetence in digital engineering or not):


« A more brain-centered, human-centered approach to sound recognizes that the main task of a brain is to manage the vibrations of a physical, three-dimensional body. Part of that task involves making sense of vibrations outside the body, both in recognizing what thing made a sound and, more especially, inferring where the sound came from.

Here’s why: Imagine you’re alone and frightened in the woods, in the dark, with threats nearby. Suddenly, crack! A twig snaps close by. At that moment, which would matter more to you: where the sound came from or what type of wood the twig was made of?

The best way to locate sounds is to use the whole body — ears, skull, skin, even guts — since the entire body contains vibration sensors. The brain’s main job is making sense of vibrations throughout the body, eyeballs to toes to eardrums, all consistent, all at once. One single vibratory image unified from skin and ears.

Headphones and earbuds fracture that unified sensory experience. Normally, your skin still absorbs vibrations from the outside, consistent with what you see. But with headphones covering them, your ears process entirely different signals injected directly into the perceptual space inside the head. That new sound image bypasses skin and eyes, while still being superimposed in front of you in space, on top of real sound sources. That physical impossibility sounds interesting, but it is the deepest kind of hack a brain can suffer, short of drugs. Consuming separate, inconsistent sensory streams that create competing maps of space violates a brain’s design.»


I repeat that one alleged or real inaccuracy does not annihilate this whole thesis because the reconstruction of the sound experience is not only a "timing" mathematical problem concerning the ears- brain system, it is a more complex problem implicating the body sensors in an environment that is active and absolutely never passive for the gesturing- hearing- sensing- body and this is the thesis of this interesting writer. And by the way this is not reducible to "Head Related Transfer Functions." necessary for constructing math simulation of some aspect of the hearing experience, because simply put in words for example, a balancing sensing body in an environment or a walking sensing body implicate the head but is not reducible to the head movement...


The analog/digital technical problem is only an aspect of this problem and thesis and a technical error does not invalidate the main point...This writer merit more than bashing argument around " a technical error"...


Ok now I am done and retreat in my abyss... I apologize for my rant but my excuse is i dont like injustice and I learn to read and this is one of my few skills... My best to you and to all...


Our eyes can see to 324 megapixels. The best digital photography can have 20 megapixel resolution. It wouldn't be a far guess that we not only hear with our ears but with our brains and bodies as well. Just because someone can't hear it doesn't mean the other person can't. The human hearing system may be more sensitive that science can measure
Some people see without eyes....

But the main point is not the ears potential technical resolutive power " per se" but how the sound is perceived and reconstructed by the sensing dynamical " brain-body", and how the" body-brain" react to the sound and help to his perception-construction...

It is a dynamical process where the sound is not a passive object to be perceived but a living phenomenon to be interpretated and inserted in a recreation process, this is a continuous action- reaction between the brain-body-environment, a tripartite process better understood via semiotics...
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.