What do we hear when we change the direction of a wire?


Douglas Self wrote a devastating article about audio anomalies back in 1988. With all the necessary knowledge and measuring tools, he did not detect any supposedly audible changes in the electrical signal. Self and his colleagues were sure that they had proved the absence of anomalies in audio, but over the past 30 years, audio anomalies have not disappeared anywhere, at the same time the authority of science in the field of audio has increasingly become questioned. It's hard to believe, but science still cannot clearly answer the question of what electricity is and what sound is! (see article by A.J.Essien).

For your information: to make sure that no potentially audible changes in the electrical signal occur when we apply any "audio magic" to our gear, no super equipment is needed. The smallest step-change in amplitude that can be detected by ear is about 0.3dB for a pure tone. In more realistic situations it is 0.5 to 1.0dB'". This is about a 10% change. (Harris J.D.). At medium volume, the voltage amplitude at the output of the amplifier is approximately 10 volts, which means that the smallest audible difference in sound will be noticeable when the output voltage changes to 1 volt. Such an error is impossible not to notice even using a conventional voltmeter, but Self and his colleagues performed much more accurate measurements, including ones made directly on the music signal using Baxandall subtraction technique - they found no error even at this highest level.

As a result, we are faced with an apparently unsolvable problem: those of us who do not hear the sound of wires, relying on the authority of scientists, claim that audio anomalies are BS. However, people who confidently perceive this component of sound are forced to make another, the only possible conclusion in this situation: the electrical and acoustic signals contain some additional signal(s) that are still unknown to science, and which we perceive with a certain sixth sense.

If there are no electrical changes in the signal, then there are no acoustic changes, respectively, hearing does not participate in the perception of anomalies. What other options can there be?

Regards.
anton_stepichev
This article is clearer:

https://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html

«(Phys.org)—For the first time, physicists have found that humans can discriminate a sound’s frequency (related to a note’s pitch) and timing (whether a note comes before or after another note) more than 10 times better than the limit imposed by the Fourier uncertainty principle. Not surprisingly, some of the subjects with the best listening precision were musicians, but even non-musicians could exceed the uncertainty limit. The results rule out the majority of auditory processing brain algorithms that have been proposed, since only a few models can match this impressive human performance.

The researchers, Jacob Oppenheim and Marcelo Magnasco at Rockefeller University in New York, have published their study on the first direct test of the Fourier uncertainty principle in human hearing in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

The Fourier uncertainty principle states that a time-frequency tradeoff exists for sound signals, so that the shorter the duration of a sound, the larger the spread of different types of frequencies is required to represent the sound. Conversely, sounds with tight clusters of frequencies must have longer durations. The uncertainty principle limits the precision of the simultaneous measurement of the duration and frequency of a sound.

To investigate human hearing in this context, the researchers turned to psychophysics, an area of study that uses various techniques to reveal how physical stimuli affect human sensation. Using physics, these techniques can establish tight bounds on the performance of the senses.....

The results have implications for how we understand the way that the brain processes sound, a question that has interested scientists for a long time. In the early 1970s, scientists found hints that human hearing could violate the uncertainty principle, but the scientific understanding and technical capabilities were not advanced enough to enable a thorough investigation. As a result, most of today’s sound analysis models are based on old theories that may now be revisited in order to capture the precision of human hearing.

"In seminars, I like demonstrating how much information is conveyed in sound by playing the sound from the scene in Casablanca where Ilsa pleads, "Play it once, Sam," Sam feigns ignorance, Ilsa insists," Magnasco said. "You can recognize the text being spoken, but you can also recognize the volume of the utterance, the emotional stance of both speakers, the identity of the speakers including the speaker’s accent (Ingrid’s faint Swedish, though her character is Norwegian, which I am told Norwegians can distinguish; Sam’s AAVE [African American Vernacular English]), the distance to the speaker (Ilsa whispers but she’s closer, Sam loudly feigns ignorance but he’s in the back), the position of the speaker (in your house you know when someone’s calling you from another room, in which room they are!), the orientation of the speaker (looking at you or away from you), an impression of the room (large, small, carpeted).

"The issue is that many fields, both basic and commercial, in sound analysis try to reconstruct only one of these, and for that they may use crude models of early hearing that transmit enough information for their purposes. But the problem is that when your analysis is a pipeline, whatever information is lost on a given stage can never be recovered later. So if you try to do very fancy analysis of, let’s say, vocal inflections of a lyric soprano, you just cannot do it with cruder models."

By ruling out many of the simpler models of auditory processing, the new results may help guide researchers to identify the true mechanism that underlies human auditory hyperacuity. Understanding this mechanism could have wide-ranging applications in areas such as speech recognition; sound analysis and processing; and radar, sonar, and radio astronomy.

"You could use fancier methods in radar or sonar to try to analyze details beyond uncertainty, since you control the pinging waveform; in fact, bats do," Magnasco said.

Building on the current results, the researchers are now investigating how human hearing is more finely tuned toward natural sounds, and also studying the temporal factor in hearing.



"Such increases in performance cannot occur in general without some assumptions," Magnasco said. "For instance, if you’re testing accuracy vs. resolution, you need to assume all signals are well separated. We have indications that the hearing system is highly attuned to the sounds you actually hear in nature, as opposed to abstract time-series; this comes under the rubric of ’ecological theories of perception’ in which you try to understand the space of natural objects being analyzed in an ecologically relevant setting, and has been hugely successful in vision. Many sounds in nature are produced by an abrupt transfer of energy followed by slow, damped decay, and hence have broken time-reversal symmetry. We just tested that subjects do much better in discriminating timing and frequency in the forward version than in the time-reversed version (manuscript submitted). Therefore the nervous system uses specific information on the physics of sound production to extract information from the sensory stream.»








Magnasco is not a "crook" like you alleged for Essien, Magnasco is peer rewiewed and his work go in the SAME direction than Essien...

dletch2 this remark of Magnasco goes hand in hand with the experiments of Essien and give the same direction of research than Essien for another reason, the Gabor limit violation by the ears/brain, instead, in the case of Essien, of the revisitation of the monochord experiment linked to the production and perception of pitch... i will repeat the words of Magnasco with uppercase for the important word:

« We have indications that the hearing system is highly attuned to the sounds you actually hear in nature, AS OPPOSED TO ABSTRACT TIME SERIES; this comes under the rubric of ’ecological theories of perception’ in which you try to understand the space of natural objects being analyzed in an ecologically relevant setting, and has been hugely successful in vision. Many sounds in nature are produced by an abrupt transfer of energy followed by slow, damped decay, and hence have broken time-reversal symmetry.»


Then retract your word about Essien at least....And admit that his doctorate thesis is not writtent by a "crook"....
mahgister..,

I apologize in advance, please do not answer if you think this is an immodest question.

I've been going to ask you for a long time. You have a picture of the great Russian singer and poet Anatoly Vertinsky on your avatar, whose lyrics were of deep philosophy and whose performances were so extravagant that he stood completely apart from his more mundane colleagues. All this reminds me very much of you.

I wonder is there any other connection between you and Anatoly Vertinsky?
I wonder is there any other connection between you and Anatoly Vertinsky?



Nothing is better to lend to yourself a russian live between other incarnations...
😊


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMaz70bOd7w

This avatar suited me because the singer and poet sing with a desesperate joy, so characteristic of the russian soul.... A despair waiting to become a joy or who become joy, is very different than despair or than joy....It is more akin to a revelation.... And life is a revelation or nothing.....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHX5s2fH69I&list=RDEM2qsdh-1g-UgOI3XtQeQKGw&index=6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppU3pNYN3jg&list=RDEM2qsdh-1g-UgOI3XtQeQKGw&index=11

An interesting remix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_Pkf4py4jM&list=RDEM2qsdh-1g-UgOI3XtQeQKGw&index=29

Essenin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yusPpYB2aLw&list=RDEM2qsdh-1g-UgOI3XtQeQKGw&index=39

I had the impression to look in myself when i listen this music and look in this avatar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLkKzGqB50o&list=RDEM2qsdh-1g-UgOI3XtQeQKGw&index=38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJlISXZw3fM




I apologize in advance, please do not answer if you think this is an immodest question.
I dont think that immodest question exist, only exist immodest answers... 😊
@millercarbon  You nailed it in your first post.  I saw a video concerning the deaf man hearing "music" through a balloon.   It's what we don't know (scientifically measured) but feel/sense that can make a difference.  Which maybe why so many highly rated components, speakers, cables, tweaks work in one system and not another, for one person or not for another.   People have different feelings/senses and synergies for audio systems vary (tremendously).  
It’s what we don’t know (scientifically measured) but feel/sense that can make a difference.
What we feel in listening must be CORRELATED by concrete change, modification or experiment....Or measures if possible...Our sixth sense is often a response not always the initiator of the experience...

We listen perhaps by a magical individual connection but also with for example acoustical and psycho acoustical law we can use and control...

The "gist" of the matter is relating feeling and thinking in one perceiving act...Not rejecting one for the other...

The war between subjectivist and objectivist is the result of a childish philosophical perspective... i reject each one in his narrow corner or introduce each one to the other for a dialogue.......

then correcting your affirmation i will add that it is also what we could learn, what we know that ALSO can make a difference...

There is NO magical "tweaks"...

There is only controls in the working embeddings dimensions related to ANY audio system...

But why some of these "controls device" work sometimes is not always very clear "scientifically"...

Anyway even if you cannot measure all there is and even if some phenomenon could not be measured for sure, we must work with the feeling and the thinking process together not one against the other....