Hearing music [human peripheral hearing system]

Traditional spectrography commonly found in speech sciences laboratories, makes use of fixed bandwidth bandpass analysis filters. The bandwidth can be adjusted to optimise between time and frequency resolution of the output spectrogram as desired. Acoustic analysis by the human ear can be modelled as a bank of bandpass filters whose bandwidth varies as a function of centre frequency. We describe a real-time transputer-based implementation of a spectrograph based on knowledge of peripheral human hearing. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the output from this system with traditional spectrograms for a variety of musical performances to illustrate: (i) the differences between the systems, (ii) psychoacoustic ideas relating to music, and (iii) the complex nature of the signal that is sent to higher centres of neural processing from each ear.