In this video, I'm going to talk about the

rather surprising way

that we can use sound frequency
information to help us determine sound
location.
The clues to sound location that come from
sound frequency are called spectral cues.
So we've been talking about the cone of
confusion that arises from
using timing differences and level
differences
to tell us about sound location.
Those cues provide information only about
the horizontal position.
We saw in the last video that movements
can help resolve this, by
moving your head, you can change the
horizontal or vertical position of the
head.
Change the relationship of sounds to the
head.
And use multiple samples gathered from
different positions
to help figure out where the sound is
located.
In this video, I'm going to tell you about
how we
use sound frequency information to
accomplish much the same end.
First, I have to tell you what is sound
frequency.
So, recall, we made a graph earlier, of
air pressure versus time.
And if the sound wave looks something like
this
one, which is a sign wave, or a pure tone.
Then it's fairly easy to describe what
frequency is contained in this sound.
And as you probably recall from physics or
math, frequency is simply the reciprocal
of wave length.
But pure tones, that is sounds whose wave
form constitutes a sine wave.
Are actually fairly unusual in our
environment.
Most sound wave forms are more, are more
complicated than that.
And that's true even for sounds that are
musical and have a definite pitch to them.
So this is the wave form of a flute
playing a particular note.
And you can see that that wave form is not
a clean sine wave.
It definitely has a period to it.
But it also has little jiggety jaggety
stuff, in that wave form.
So, how would you, would you describe the
frequency of this sound?
Well, that takes us to an analysis called
Fourier Analysis.
Fourier was a mathematician who realized
that you
could take any complicated wave form and
deconstruct it.
You could express it as the sum of simpler
sine waves of different frequencies and
with different amplitudes.
So for example, this wave form here, has
kind of an overall shape like that.
Combined with a higher frequency, smaller
oscillation to it.
And I actually constructed that waveform
by making this
sine wave and this sine wave and adding
them together.
So Fourier analysis involves taking this
complicated waveform and figuring out what
simpler
sine waves need to be added together to
produce this more complicated wave.
Viewed this way most sounds have multiple
frequencies.
These are three different musical
instruments all playing the same note.
Here's the flute /s, the
pennywhistle, /s, and the banjo /s.
So we can hear that those are the same
note,
but we can also hear that they are
different instruments.
We hear these as being the same
note, because they have the same
fundamental frequency.
That is the low frequency large
oscillations
are the same in all three of these
panels, but they differ in how many
of these smaller high frequency components
are present.
Now we can graph this, and here's how we
do it.
So, let's take our example of a
complicated wave
form as the sum of two simpler sine waves.
We can make a graph of amplitude versus
the frequency of those sine waves.
So here the low frequency component.
Would be plotted here.
It has a fairly large amplitude, so we'll
give it a fairly large size on the y axis.
This component is a higher frequency, so
we'll plot it higher on the frequency
axis, but we'll give it a smaller size
because its amplitude is smaller.
So, this kind of a graph is known as a
spectrum.
And spectrum provide a, a kind of a more
complete picture
of the multiple frequencies that can be
present in a given sound.
Okay, now a brief mention of how
sound frequencies encoded in the auditory
pathway.
There are two ways that the auditory
pathway accomplishes this.
One involves the location of hair cells in
the cochlea.
And here is how this works.
The Basilar membrane here has a resonance
gradient along its length.
It resonates or oscillates better to some
frequencies than to others.
And the precise pattern differs along its
length.
So, down at this end, it resonates more to
high frequencies,
and down at this end, it resonates more
strongly to low frequencies.
Hair cells situated at different positions
will respond
more to high frequency sounds versus low
frequency sounds.
The second way that the auditory pathway
encodes
sound frequency is in the timing of action
potentials.
Recall that as the Basilar membrane
oscillates up and down, the hairs on
hair cells are scraped back and forth,
causing ion channels to open and close.
The opening of ion channels is
synchronized
with the motion of the Basilar membrane.
And the action potentials that they
ultimately
cause are synchronized with that motion as
well.
This synchrony is referred to as phase
locking.
All right but, what about frequency and
sound location?
Well, sounds are filtered by the external
ear or the pinna, so everyone has little
folds in their external ear and, those
folds,
alter the amount of energy at different
frequencies.
The filtering that they accomplish is
direction-dependent.
So different frequencies are attenuated to
different degrees
depending on what direction the sound is
coming from.
This frequency information about sound
location is called a spectral cue.
So here's how it works.
Suppose there's a sound of a
particular frequency coming from a
particular speaker.
That sound hits the outer ear, travels
along some path.
Bouncing, bouncing through those folds and
then ultimately entering the ear canal.
Maybe after bouncing in that particular
pattern, it ends
up inside the ear canal, slightly
diminished in amplitude.
A sound coming from the same location but
having
a different frequency might bounce in a
slightly different
pattern, resulting in a slightly different
amount of attenuation
when the sound enters the ear canal and so
forth.
So sounds coming from the same location
and starting off with
the same amplitude, end up in the ear
canal having different amplitudes.
[BLANK_AUDIO].
And similarly, sounds that have the same
exact
wave form, but are coming from a different
origin, end up in the ear canal having
been filtered differently and having
different amplitudes, like this.
So, the ear filters these two sounds.
And then inside the ear canal, if we
make a graph of pressure versus time, the
signal
from location A might be like this,
whereas
the signal from location B might be like
this.
These spectral cues vary in all
directions.
They vary horizontally, vertically, and
with the front-back dimension.
And they're used in concert with intraoral
timing and
level differences to help solve the cone
of confusion.
What I haven't yet told you about is what
a
complicated process it is to learn how to
do this.
It's something that we all learn how to
do.
And in the next video, I'm going to tell
you how we accomplish this.