Title:
"High-fidelity audio, psychoacoustics, and how our hearing works"
by Milind Kunchur
When and where:
Friday, Jan. 30, 2:30-4:00 p.m., in R210 of Music School
Abstract: "Many misconceptions and mysteries surround the perception and
reproduction of musical sounds. Common specifications, such as frequency
response, provide an inadequate indication of the sound quality. Typically,
electronically reproduced sound bears a distant resemblance to the sound of
an acoustic instrument. High-end audio enthusiasts have long claimed that
minute errors in the time domain (arising from jitter in digital sources,
smearing in wires, speaker misalignments, etc.) can significantly
deteriorate sound quality. These claims are usually dismissed as lunacy
because they imply that the human ear can discriminate timing errors in
microseconds, which seems to defy the high frequency hearing limit of 20
kHz. Our research shows the inapplicability of the usually assumed
time-frequency relationship through neurophysiological modeling of the
hearing system and psychoacoustical measurements on human subjects. In this
talk I will discuss some of the important elements of good sound
reproduction, give a brief summary of our blind listening tests on human
subjects, and give a simplified explanation of how our ear works. [This
research was partially supported by the University of South Carolina Office
of Research and Health Sciences Research Funding.]"