ABSTRACT
THE NEXT TIME you watch a movie at a theater,close your eyes for a couple of minutes and consider all of the auditory information that is present. Some of the sounds will be high in pitch and others low. You’ll likely be able to distinguish the actors’ voices-even if they’re roughly the same pitch. Some of the sounds will be louder and some softer. If the audio system is of sufficiently high quality, some of the sounds will seem to come from one direction and some from other directions. It’s truly amazing, but all of these perceptual experiences emerge from sound waves causing a very tiny, thin, hairy piece of tissue on each side of your head to bounce wildly up and down in a complex fashion. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how organisms extract these different perceptual qualities from the sound pressure changes in the environment. We begin by studying the perceptual experience of pitch.
