The Human Auditory System and Audio

TL;DR

This paper reviews the complex mechanisms of the human auditory system, highlighting its exceptional temporal resolution and sensitivity, and explores how these features relate to sound fidelity in reproduction.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey and new insights into the auditory system's capabilities and their implications for sound fidelity.

Findings

Auditory temporal resolution can be as precise as microseconds.

The human ear can detect membrane amplitudes at the picometer level.

The neural excitation pattern encodes vast sonic detail.

Abstract

This work reviews the human auditory system, elucidating some of the specialized mechanisms and non-linear pathways along the chain of events between physical sound and its perception. Customary relationships between frequency, time, and phase--such as the uncertainty principle--that hold for linear systems, do not apply straightforwardly to the hearing process. Auditory temporal resolution for certain processes can be a hundredth of the period of the signal, and can extend down to the microseconds time scale. The astonishingly large number of variations that correspond to the neural excitation pattern of 30000 auditory nerve fibers, originating from 3500 inner hair cells, explicates the vast capacity of the auditory system for the resolution of sonic detail. And the ear is sensitive enough to detect a basilar-membrane amplitude at the level of a picometer, or about a hundred times smaller than an atom. This article surveys and provides new insights into some of the impressive capabilities of the human auditory system and explores their relationship to fidelity in reproduced sound.