11–20 of 54 posts
What does this mean?
"These sonograms are remarkably different from other sounds, as if birds “draw” with sound something that’s flying backwards in time."
For a moment I thought they would hypothesize that the patterns might be an actual “rendering” of what the birds were looking at, especially when I saw the 7th image which looks remarkably similar to a rodent. Apparently I'm pretty far off, but just this idea of animals communicating images with sound waves was something I'd otherwise never have.
Some people see colors or feel tastes... and it doesn't seem that unlikely that there would be selection pressure for parts of the bird brain to connect their spatial awareness to their auditory system and then songs. There could be a nice feedback loop that their own songs would strike similar experiences for themselves (if they hear themselves similar to others).
Of course we know that bats have this type of neural connection in echolocation and dolphins/whales may even using it to communicate in similar ways with their songs.
Um, I'd like to be able to parse this article. but I don't know what it is saying. Can anyone explain the gist of it to me in simple terms? What does this mean? "These sonograms are remarkably different from other sounds, as if birds “draw” with sound something that’s flying backwards in time."
Basically, all sounds that you hear are composed of many layered sine waves of different frequencies and intensities. The graphs in the post are spectrograms, which graph those frequencies over time. The Y axis represents pitch, the X axis represents time, and the brightness at any given point represents how loud that particular frequency was at that particular time.
Most sounds, even seemingly simple ones, look very complex on a sonogram, like a smudged pen stroke. The images of different instruments below demonstrate this; these are all very complex sounds, even though we only hear it as a single note being played. The voice one is one of my favorites, because it shows just how weird and complicated everyday sounds can get.
But bird songs are different; on a sonogram, they appear as a single line. The complexity of the bird songs here comes from the fact that they're taking a single sine wave and changing the pitch over time. Where most sounds look like a complex mix of smudged paint strokes, bird songs look like a single, precise, bouncing stroke.
This is amazing. The GitHub repo has more information too, about how the common explanation of how our ears work (isolating sounds in an FFT-like-process) may be incorrect: > Contrary to what you might think, our ears don't seem to rely on an FFT-like process to extract isolated frequencies. Instead, our ears detect periodic parts in the signal, although in most cases those periodic parts closely match the FFT freque…
Put in earbuds or a headset and (quietly) play sounds that are slightly different in frequency (1-10hz).
You will still hear a sort of ethereal beat tone between them that's different than the beat you would hear if you were listening to the same through speakers. I don't see how this would occur frequency-domain perception and it's too present (at least in my experiment) to be attributed to bone conduction across the skull.
It's a feature
https://monoskop.org/images/a/af/Gough_C_2007_The_violin_Chl...
This is amazing. The GitHub repo has more information too, about how the common explanation of how our ears work (isolating sounds in an FFT-like-process) may be incorrect: > Contrary to what you might think, our ears don't seem to rely on an FFT-like process to extract isolated frequencies. Instead, our ears detect periodic parts in the signal, although in most cases those periodic parts closely match the FFT freque…
This is my laymans test for the FFT theory. Put in earbuds or a headset and (quietly) play sounds that are slightly different in frequency (1-10hz). You will still hear a sort of ethereal beat tone between them that's different than the beat you would hear if you were listening to the same through speakers. I don't see how this would occur frequency-domain perception and it's too present (at least in my experiment) t…
For a moment I thought they would hypothesize that the patterns might be an actual “rendering” of what the birds were looking at, especially when I saw the 7th image which looks remarkably similar to a rodent. Apparently I'm pretty far off, but just this idea of animals communicating images with sound waves was something I'd otherwise never have.
For a moment I thought they would hypothesize that the patterns might be an actual “rendering” of what the birds were looking at, especially when I saw the 7th image which looks remarkably similar to a rodent. Apparently I'm pretty far off, but just this idea of animals communicating images with sound waves was something I'd otherwise never have.
What if groups/species of birds had "collective synesthesia"? Some people see colors or feel tastes... and it doesn't seem that unlikely that there would be selection pressure for parts of the bird brain to connect their spatial awareness to their auditory system and then songs. There could be a nice feedback loop that their own songs would strike similar experiences for themselves (if they hear themselves similar to…
The resonance of the flute's air chamber is driven by the noise of forced air stream, which is why it contains high frequencies at all. Of course you can't recreate the flute sound just with some periodic sinusoidals, because the noise component has to be present. The noise is complex and is itself filtered by the flute's chamber, in a different way depending on which valves are closed. You can play a recognizeable scale on a flute without getting a tone out of it, just using air noise, the same way you can produce a musical tune using chhhh sounds out your mouth. Those notes, or something like them, are still there in the background when a tone is being produced. There is no flute tone without them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if groups/species of birds had "collective synesthesia"? Some people see colors or feel tastes... and it doesn't seem that unlikely that there would be selection pressure for parts of the bird brain to connect their spatial awareness to their auditory system and then songs. There could be a nice feedback loop that their own songs would strike similar experiences for themselves (if they hear themselves similar to…
I remember that "cymascope" experiment that used a dolphin's sound as input. Turned out the water surface had an image (after lots of noise deblurring) of a human the dolphin just seen. This means the organ that decodes sound is a simple membrane with water. How dolphins encode images into sound is a separate question.