[FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

[jon zingale]

Along the lines of Marcus' comments, I feel that there is quite a bit to say
about couplings: device to the cochlea, cochlea to mind. At each stage,
problems of impedance matching exist, purely acoustic matchings as-well-as
matchings to accumulated weights in networks.
Addressing the first impedance problem is not too far removed from the
audiophile problem of designing a home theater. How can one create a system
(source, room, receiver, location in the room) where place (here) is
replaced by the feeling of a concert hall, of /being there/. Our ears are
not anechoic chambers, they have very poor acoustic isolation, and I very
much empathize with those that find themselves confined to live in
headphones. It must be very disorienting indeed. Much of what we hear (and
thus learned to calibrate with) is influenced by the effect of sound on the
body, the temporal bone, sound through soft membranes, etc... The hearing
aid is likely not accounting for these differences in phase, those come to
the cochlea via an /other/ means. There is the problem of the speaker size,
that a small speaker is limited in its capacity to /push bass/. Even when I
walk, with noise-canceling headphones, there is the mixed information of
receiving bass through my body (trains, trucks, and ambient hum) versus the
bass provided by the music I am listening to. I suspect the body trained to
calibrate this *additional* information in ways that a hearing aid (in its
form today) simply cannot meet.
As to the second impedance problem, if something general can be said of
neurological learning, what are the preferred modes of interpretation that
neurology tends to? For instance, in the limit wavelets and Fourier
transforms[λ] ought to be the same (I suspect), but both in practice (in
implementation) are very different and there might require a more careful
analysis of the biology itself before the question is settled. There are
questions of affordances, questions of computational trade-offs, capacities
to work with what is given. A few years ago, Nick sent me a paper on 
locality-sensitive-hashing
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing>   where
researchers attempted to derive useful  hashing algorithms
<https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6364/793>   given the limited
resources available to the olfactory system of fruit flies. I suspect that
any fruitful determination of function (Fourier transform, wavelet,
something else entirely...) must involve an investigation of human capacity,
of affordance.
[λ] I don't know much about wavelets, and while I know some about Fourier
transforms there is much I very much do not know. In this  accessible
lecture by Terrence Tao
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnkinNVPjyw&ab_channel=TheAbelPrize>  , he
presents the work of Yves Meyer on Wavelets and provides some insight into
how this technique can be very different in content than the technique of
Fourier.



--
Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20210209/e20c35ec/attachment.html>