Question of Pitch Perception

[guyman]

Wonder if we perceive <20Hz and subsonics through resonance in the skull/bones and such? As higher resonance... but the mind/perception filters it somehow...

And in a band context as Martin mentioned... Maybe also percieve very low "off notes" by instead noticing some sort of secondary standing waves that feels all wrong or are themselves off note "for the context" or interacts all wrong with both any playing notes and all of the instruments bodies present in the same room?

I've had a few shakers/tactile tranducers (or Exciters/Resonators as Monacor describes them) installed in both home cinema and hifi setup. They can really trick the mind in all sorts of ways...

I'm of the persuasion that we perceive acoustics, musically, with every cell of our body. I think of not only the cymatic effect of particular geometric resonances on our solid structures having an interplay of effects on the processes of our molecular makeup- but an intermodulation (freq mod, amp mod, phase mod) effect on our biorhythms, brainwaves, and other vibratory happenings within our body's system. This is why I was in a debate earlier this year on the discord over the use of oversampling filters in my music, and their shaping on the response of frequencies over nyquist (which for me currently is 22.5 khz). It wasn't that I was trying to be overly superstitious about hypersonic frequencies, but just putting thought to the fact that there are a gazillion processes taking place beyond what we consider our musical perception. Their "relevancy" is to be debated I suppose.

I kind of break down the hierarchy of perception/"happenings" like:

Conscious Identifiable Perception Of Bodily Effect >
Conscious Unidentifiable Perception Of Bodily Effect >
Subconcious Perception Of Bodily Effect >
Superconscious / Environmental Perception Of ExtraBodily Effect.

Our perception is like a Sunburst Gradient- where do we put our relevant edges?

[guyman]

I’ve not done any research into this, but I do know that my hearing system can tell me that very low notes can actually sound very out of tune, so much so that an ascending chromatic scale can actually sound in the wrong order, to me anyway.

Chromatic notes sound out of order, yeah that happens to me too !!

[Spogg]

I’m going a little off-topic here, but I wanted to tell you about an experiment I did in my twenties:

I had a cold type of infection and had a persistent whistling in my ears. I was curious to see what the pitch of this was and we had signal generators and headphones in the lab. As I approached the pitch (using a sinewave source) I was truly amazed that I could hear definite beating between the signal and my brain’s whistle sound. I’ve never worked out how a such a thing could happen, since I consider the whistle to be a psychoacoustic thing rather than an actual vibration of anything. I can’t remember the actual pitch, but it was high.

My lasting thought is that there must be something analogous to vibration in our acoustic perception system, otherwise how could I hear actual beating?

[guyman]

I’m going a little off-topic here, but I wanted to tell you about an experiment I did in my twenties:

I had a cold type of infection and had a persistent whistling in my ears. I was curious to see what the pitch of this was and we had signal generators and headphones in the lab. As I approached the pitch (using a sinewave source) I was truly amazed that I could hear definite beating between the signal and my brain’s whistle sound. I’ve never worked out how a such a thing could happen, since I consider the whistle to be a psychoacoustic thing rather than an actual vibration of anything. I can’t remember the actual pitch, but it was high.

My lasting thought is that there must be something analogous to vibration in our acoustic perception system, otherwise how could I hear actual beating?

That's quite remarkable, I'm not completely surprised though. When we wear headphones and listen to binaural beats, there is a similar, if not the same phenomena occurring. You have a tone in the left ear, and the same tone moved a few cents up or down in the right ear - the two frequencies will cause a pulsing/whirling stereo sound equivalent to the difference between them. In the air this makes perfect sense, as the air pressure field is pulsing because of the phase differences--- but in the head with headphones the phenomenon is completely psychoacoustic.

[R&R]

Age is another factor. You lose the ability to sense high frequencies with every year. At one point you are lucky to recognize anything at 12 kHz or above. Let alone recognizing clear pitches.

Unfortunately...

A little tangent as well about the subject of hearing loss...
I've added a pair of extra 1dm high (4inch) ribbon tweeters... placed on the wall behind and above my speaker cabinets in the current hifi setup. The goal wasn't to mitigate hearing loss, but to widen stereo image and raise top freqs. I ended up soldering a gentle crossover starting at 16khz for the tweeters...

However this also solved some of my "due to age" dampened or lost frequencies as well.

An interesting thing is that played "alone" the sound from these ribbon tweeters are not that perceivable... more of a HF hiss.
But played together with the main speakers, they of course just add ontop of the already present mainspeaker HF... but funny thing is that they then become much more localizable. Some kind of secondary effect. No chance any phase cancelation is happening at HF but the effect has to be some kind of acoustical interaction.

My lasting thought is that there must be something analogous to vibration in our acoustic perception system, otherwise how could I hear actual beating?

Due to a severe case of tinnitus in both ears... I've always been interesting in stuff related to these things and very early on sweep-tested my "ringing" and found it to be around 11.3khz with deviation between L and R ear. Along with this inability to hear that frequency, also a bit of a drop of hearing in a wider frequency range in one ear.

I noticed that one of the theories is that tinnitus isn't fully caused by damaged stereocilia, or what it's attributed to... But tinnitus instead caused by the lack of signals from the ear going to the hearing center of the brain, causing neurons in that region to self stimulate for signals that are no longer sent from the ear... causing tinnitus-specific ringing. Seems alot of things are going on with our hearing system

[R&R]

I kind of break down the hierarchy of perception/"happenings" like:

Conscious Identifiable Perception Of Bodily Effect >
Conscious Unidentifiable Perception Of Bodily Effect >
Subconcious Perception Of Bodily Effect >
Superconscious / Environmental Perception Of ExtraBodily Effect.

Our perception is like a Sunburst Gradient- where do we put our relevant edges?

Seems subjective... I would personally place the relevance at "Conscious Unidentifiable Perception Of Bodily Effect" but include a little bit of "Subconcious Perception Of Bodily Effect".

Irony is that the feeling envoked by "really good music" or a subjectively pleasing sound, kinda falls into the "Superconscious" category, in a way
But then again, there is a good chance that there is some thruth to the theory... that our brain's axons uses quantum field effects. In that case, we are all Superconscious beings

[trogluddite]

...there must be something analogous to vibration in our acoustic perception system...

That is at least partly true of all of our senses. Nerves/synapses are essentially binary in nature - a stronger stimulus does not produce a "stronger" signal, as nerve impulses are either present or not present; but the frequency with which pulses are sent corresponds with changes to the strength of the stimulus. You could say that our entire nervous system is "pulse rate modulated".

...tinnitus instead caused by the lack of signals [...] causing neurons in that region to self stimulate...

Good circumstantial evidence for this comes from conditions such as Charles-Bonnet Syndrome, where gradual loss of visual acuity can eventually lead to quite complex, though usually banal, hallucinations (e.g. see this TED talk by Oliver Sacks).

Our brains' very strong pattern-seeking behaviour might play a part too. I have always had quite strong "visual snow", which AFAIK essentially means that I can percieve random neural noise. It's usually like having brightly coloured TV static overlaid over my vision; but when there's no genuine visual stimulus to process or when a migraine is coming, the noise will start to resolve into swirling patterns (similar to descriptions of LSD experiences it seems). I also get an auditory equivalent, which doesn't seem to fit typical descriptions of tinnitus - rather than a fixed pattern of tones and noise, it is a very dynamic thing, sounding uncannily like the background noise on the bridge of the original USS Enterprise.

Taking things further, syneasthesia can blur the distinctions between sensory modalities. I have a weak form in which what I see and hear can be sensed as tactile and proprioceptive sensations - e.g. sounds can, from my perspective, be felt travelling "through" or "stretching the shape" of my body, in ways incomparable to any real touch or physical motion. There are cases of this where specific notes of the musical scale are perceived to have distinct colours, tastes, or even personalities (e.g. musician Adam Neely discusses his experience of it in this video).

[R&R]

Taking things further, syneasthesia can blur the distinctions between sensory modalities. I have a weak form in which what I see and hear can be sensed as tactile and proprioceptive sensations - e.g. sounds can, from my perspective, be felt travelling "through" or "stretching the shape" of my body, in ways incomparable to any real touch or physical motion. There are cases of this where specific notes of the musical scale are perceived to have distinct colours, tastes, or even personalities (e.g. musician Adam Neely discusses his experience of it in this video).

All those different phenomena sure sounds alot better than my continous tinnitus

Maybe some extra savant connections in the brain going on there Not uncommon in people blessed with extraordinary musical abilities, together with ambidextrous motor skills... seen in alot of good instrument players.

All I got was my tinnitus

[billv]

tinnitus

I was gonna tell this story last year but I forgot.
I have tinnitus real bad, ever since my teens. For me there are two types of tinnitus.
The first is "Industrial deafness", the one that I have, that comes from audio abuse.
The second is "domestic deafness", that usually diagnosed as a "neural network dysfunction".
Last year i came across a drug called "Silencil", that was getting rave reviews
as the best new drug for tinnitus. I had a feeling this drug would be useless, that it was targeting
the "domestic " variety. but I gave it a go anyway. ...It did'nt work.
The best cure I''ve found Cicada frequency, especially in the spring, when the garden
is filled with these creatures, that blanket the audio spectrum with mother nature's "Tick-Tock rhythm.
It's f##king awesome.
The sad thing about tinnitus sufferer's, is that we can never again experience the joy of absolute silence.
A horrible reality.

[R&R]

The first is "Industrial deafness", the one that I have, that comes from audio abuse.
The second is "domestic deafness", that usually diagnosed as a "neural network dysfunction".
Last year i came across a drug called "Silencil", that was getting rave reviews

I damaged my ears when I was younger, but defined like that I likely have combination of both...
A permanent level ringing (+hearing loss) agitated by loud noise... get fatigued hearing quickly can't stand loud noise anymore, and a second variant (with slightly different ringing but still the same tinnitus somehow) when for example I have done some exercise/training or when experiencing neckpain for example. Worst is when the second variant decide plague at the same time when already fatigued... causing a raging ringing.

The sad thing about tinnitus sufferer's, is that we can never again experience the joy of absolute silence.
A horrible reality.

Wonder how much (on a scale) it has affected once's focus. Have a vague memory of near silence when I was young.

The take away is...
All of you out there that don't have problems with your hearing. Be careful, take care of you ears!!!
If you don't suffer from other chronic issues already you might not realize how much tinnitus sucks until you have it yourself.