adamdea
You are not a sound quality evaluation device
aaaargh. I promised myself I wasn't going to fall into this rabbit hole. But....I started to wonder whether I was going mad and had misremembered that the temporal resolution results I could recall were in the millisecond range. Random search pulled up this
comparing musicians and non-musicians with 3 different temporal resolution tests -duration discrimination, pulse train duration discrimination and gap detection. I think you can see from figs 1 and 2 that they lie in the ms range for both musicians and non-musicians.
Temporal Resolution and Active Auditory Discrimination Skill in Vocal Musicians
Introduction Enhanced auditory perception in musicians is likely to result from auditory perceptual learning during several years of training and practice. Many studies have focused on biological processing of auditory stimuli among musicians. ...www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
I claim no expertise but does this support the notion that humans have temporal resolution abilities which could not be captured by 16/44? That humans have unlimited and uncharted temporal resolution. That there is soooooooo much "we" don't know about the uncanny hearing ability of humans?
The key text relied on by Kunchur is reference 146 which is this (Leshowitz)
Measurement of the Two‐Click Threshold
Observers were asked to discriminate between a pair of 10‐μsec pulses and a single 20‐μsec pulse having the same total energy. The independent variable was the
pubs.aip.org
"This agrees with the measured ~4–10 μs TR thresholds for discriminating the gap between double pulses [146], which
is the only relevant experiment that could be found in the literature (as discussed below, various other “temporal resolution” experiments do not correctly probe “transient resolution” as defined here)*. Note that TR has no direct connection with fmax. Thus high-frequency hearing loss will not compromise the synchronicity detection between frequencies that are still audible" AND
."....The quintessential experiment for this is [146], which compared a pair of 10 μs pulses separated by a space ∆t versus a single 20 μs pulse. This produced a discernability of ∆t ~ 10 μs when the stimuli were isolated and ∆t ~ 4 μs when they were repeated with a periodicity of 0.2 ms. [146] was inconclusive as to the spectral versus temporal basis of the discrimination, and it correctly pointed out (first sentence on their page 464) that JNDs measured with continuous tones cannot be quantitatively applied to analyze transient signals"
with the abstract of [146] itself
"Observers were asked to discriminate between a pair of 10‐μsec pulses and a single 20‐μsec pulse having the same total energy. The independent variable was the time, ΔT, between the two 10‐μsec pulses. The stimuli were also presented as elements in a periodic pulse train. The ΔT required for resolution of two clicks (two‐click threshold) was 10 μsec. Whereas the addition of a steady background noise produced a remarkably small change in the magnitude of the two‐click threshold, performance deteriorated markedly when the pulses were low‐pass filtered. It appears that discrimination of slight changes in the energy spectrum of the two transient signals, especially in the high‐frequency region (8000 Hz and above), underlies the ear's sensitivity to a temporal discontinuity."
Obviously one has to be cautious because it's just the abstract, but ....it seems on the face of it seems that Leshowitz thought it was the variation in frequency which mattered - which is supported by the fact that the low pass filtering caused performance to deteriorate. But Kunchur has seized on this (quite old) test in isolation and chosen to interpret it as relating to purely temporal resolution (and note the only form of temporal resolution which matters) rather than frequency discrimination.
Why? Because as he just-about acknowledges- the more usual (and it seems fairly frequently repeated) measures of temporal resolution as used for example in lots of papers about the effect age related hearing loss, show a much more modest temporal resolution requirement for ordinary hearing (which of course deteriorates with age-see below).
Funny isn't that those other tests are not quoted at all, given that this supposed to be a "review of the human auditory system."
Interestingly another point he mentions repeatedly is in this "review of the human auditory system" is that people with age related hearing loss** only have their frequency range restricted but can still distinguish subtle time domain changes. Here Kunchur shows that he isn't just a physicist he is absolutely up to date with the audiophile agenda. Any fool looking at the literature of age related hearing loss will immediately see that err yes it affects temporal resolution not just frequency resolution. And now that takes us back to
"Note that TR has no direct connection with fmax. Thus high-frequency hearing loss will not compromise the synchronicity detection between
frequencies that are still audible"
which he gets from a paper whose abstract says
"performance deteriorated markedly when the pulses were low‐pass filtered. It appears that discrimination of slight changes in the energy spectrum of the two transient signals, especially in the high‐frequency region (8000 Hz and above), underlies the ear's sensitivity to a temporal discontinuity"
huh?
Anyway it would be nice if someone could get hold of the 1971 Leshowitz paper itself . Maybe kunchur is right about it...
* ie none of the researchers into human perception have thought it worth analysing temporal resolution in the way Kunchur does. They just analyse it in other ways that don't matter, the idiots.
** like most audiophiles
