How is audio processed in the brain when receiving sounds with different lengths? I.e. car horn vs bird chirp? How does the brain separate each other when they are intertwined?

Question

How is audio processed in the brain when receiving sounds with different lengths? I.e. car horn vs bird chirp? How does the brain separate each other when they are intertwined?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Sensory processing is complicated, but a relatively simple artificial version of it is something called the Fourier transform. Fourier transforms basically take the added-up combinations of a bunch of frequencies of sound and break them up into the component frequencies – which for two different sounds are typically pretty different in a way that isn’t very hard to identify.