Post

Matt Henderson
@matthen.com

What if our ears were like our eyes, and only had three (types of) receptors? Interestingly speech is still more or less intelligible, but not much else to me this shows how much more discriminating of frequencies our hearing is than our vision. Of course our vision has much more spatial resolution

38 reposts182 likes

Kimb
@kimb.dev

How did you pick the frequency ranges? I know with eyes the detection is quite asymmetric (like we see twice as many variants of green than other colors iirc?)

Xenia 🔍💎
@xenia.bsky.social

no you said vision has more spatial resolution than hearing I mean that light having higher spatial resolution than sound (shorter wavelength) partially explains why vision has better acuity than hearing aside from just the perceptual differences, like electron microscopes vs optical microscopes

Invert
@invert.bsky.social

Isn’t this roughly what happens with cochlear implants? (With many more channels [electrodes], but not enough to reproduce the fidelity of natural hearing)

Kevin Mallery
@kevinmallery.bsky.social

This seems functionally similar to how Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) work. There you need about a dozen features for decent reconstruction. This is a classic voice recognition method.

Erik Strub
@erikstrub.bsky.social

But is this not mostly due to the fact that visible frequences span a range of about 1 octave (doubling) while we are able to hear about 10 octaves? The speech aspect is nevertheless very interesting.