I understand how sound is generated by pressure waves vibrating the eardrum. And this makes perfect sense to me when a single sound is generating that vibration. But when multiple sounds are vibrating the eardrum at the same time (like when listening to music with different instruments and vocals) how does the brain tease those differing vibrations apart so we can hear the individual inputs…as opposed to them mixing all together into one sound; The equivalent of mixing a bunch of different paint colors together and ending up with brown.
In: Biology
I don’t understand it well enough myself, but complex waveforms are just waves added up. Since the human brain does not need to discern specific frequencies, just the sum of the data, I don’t believe theres much signal processing going on until it gets to analyzing speech and the like.
FFT or Fast Fourier Transform is the process computers use to do the work. But humans wouldn’t have a good reason to know that somebody’s voice is exactly between xHz and xHz.
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