Human Time-Frequency Acuity Beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle
Condensed Matter journal club
Human Time-Frequency Acuity Beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle
- Event time: 11:30am
- Event date: 8th February 2013
- Speaker: Tom Underwood (Formerly School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
- Location: Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
Abstract
The time-frequency uncertainty principle states that the product of the temporal and frequency extents of a signal can not be smaller than 1/4π. We study human ability to simultaneously judge the frequency and the timing of a sound. Our subjects often exceeded the uncertainty limit, sometimes by more than tenfold, mostly through remarkable timing acuity. Our results establish a lower bound for the nonlinearity and complexity of the algorithms employed by our brains in parsing transient sounds, rule out similar "linear filter" models of early auditory processing, and highlight timing acuity as a central feature in auditory object processing.PRL 110 article 044301 (2013)
pdf version
Authors
J.N. Oppenheim, M.O. Magnasco
About Condensed Matter journal club
Given the diversity of research in the CM group, chosen topics vary widely. We tend to stick to high-impact journals - Nature, Science, PNAS and PRL have been popular - but this is not prescriptive..