eli5 How does the brain separate out frequencies it’s hearing so that we can make out different instruments in a song? It seems like some insanely complex analysis behind the scenes??
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The brain is an expert at pattern recognition. The brain is efficient et recognizing faces, shapes and other familiar things and sounds are no different. The brain categorizes sounds it hears individually with respective instruments; it learns sounds just like it would learn words. When listening to a song, it listens to parts of the song where only one or just a few instruments play and from that it’s easy to recognize the instruments. In music there are often moments where just a few instruments actually make a sound at a brief period of time. Even sounds that have a few instruments playing at a time can be identified by “simulating” or combining instruments in your head to match what you are hearing thus getting the instruments used. This is all done “automatically” or subconsciously. The latter method is called bruteforcing and is inefficient.
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