Auditory spatial coding
My Ph.D. thesis looked at auditory spatial coding in a midbrain sensory motor integration centre.
“While visual and somatosensory spatial information can be derived from topographic projections from the sensory epithelium to the central nuclei, the auditory sensory receptor surface is organised with respect to frequency, not space, with the consequence that auditory spatial information must be ‘computed’ from physical sound location cues.”
Two fundamental aspects of this research have bothered me over the years:
- What does auditory space actually mean?
- do sound waves occupy a space or do they travel through it?
- localisation is of a sound source, not a sound per se
- sound source does not always emit sounds
- sound localisation is actually sound streaming or sound identification
- does it make sense for a sound to occupy a space smaller than its fundamental frequency?
- Sound is transient and dynamic and its semantic or referential relationship with its source is not captured by a physical level analysis in terms of analysis of sound waves
- sounds are transient
- the important sound parameters are temporal not spatial
- looking at auditory spatial coding is misconstruing the nature of sound
sounds are cognitive categorisations not physical ones, in the same way that black and white are cognitive ly real colours and any argument that black is not a colour because it is the ‘absence of light’ is putting a terminology at the physical level of understanding into a quite different and inappropriate domain which shares words not meanings
I am revisiting the work of Pylyshyn, Fodor and Dennett in Philosophy of Mind now that I have sufficient breadth of knowledge to understand the relevance of their writing to my own work.
