How Science Got Sound Wrong

Musical sounds for example are like words and numbers a tough nuts to crack if someone think that these are ready made nuts coming from a tree without seeing the growing dynamical potential which constitute them...Which comes first the egg or the hen?


Sounds are not understood being only object external to a subject, no more than rainbows are understood being only an  external object with a pot of gold at the end...These are phenomenon, this is a philosophical useful concept, not reducible to the concept of object...

One of the greatest conductor and maestro of the last century, is a mathematician by formation, Ernest Ansermet, and he wrote a book of 1 thousand two hundred pages about musical sound perception...There is explained the irreducible depth of the perception-creation of musical sound that transcend the acoustical phenomenon because the body-consciousness is implicated....Good read...

I stumble on to a description of the author of this article unknown to me on the net,
and this author seems to me not a complete moron...I am happy that this description confirm my lecture impression...

«William Softky is a biophysicist who was among the first neuroscientists to understand microtiming, and among the first technologists to build that understanding into algorithms. Thousands have cited his scientific work, his PhD in Theoretical Physics is from Caltech, his name is on 10 patents and two of the companies he inspired were acquired for $160 million total.»

Perhaps after all it is necessary to read his article a second time before discrediting him about a minor point compared to his main thesis....

For me learning to read is precisely that, reading 2 times, the first time the tree always mask the forest, the second time we are ready to see the forest forgetting some obfuscating tree...


Reading is even more painful to begin with and at the end than most people think ….  :)

Can't agree with you Mahgister. Whole premise of the article was that digitized systems only have timing accuracy to a sampling rate level and hence miss micro-timing. That is a 100% false premise. Digitized systems with high SNR have very high timing resolution as long as the system is bandwidth limited which digital audio is ... And so is our auditory system.  As was pointed out above, neurons don't simply fire on/off either.

I am afraid that the tree you see is the only point you want to see...
Like someone who is stuck on the point he want to understand or can understand not any other...

I already said that even if you are right, it is only a point among other important points in the main thesis of this author who argue that the processing of sound is not only about microtiming in digital technology only but linked to the dynamical body brain harmonization of the complex muti sensors in a living event... In his words:« Consuming separate, inconsistent sensory streams that create competing maps of space violates a brain’s design.» That illustrate the main point of his thesis that concern not only digital engineering mathematics but also the body dynamical rhythmic sensors processing...In a word when he speaks about sound he does not speaks about the ears " per se" but about the whole synchronization of ALL the body sensors in a lived situation and not only the brain’s neurons but the entire neuronal matrix in the gesturing body...By the way i am sure that he knows that neurons are not only firing on/ off...

I will not argue further with you i am not competent to argue about microtiming and perception i only pretend that i know how to read that’s all and taking only some point in an article and not all the others is not my method of analytic reading ...My rant was only a reaction to the bashing of the entire article around a tech point that is only that, a point, in a way more complex thesis...My best to you...

No Mahgister you are trying to see things in this article that frankly are not there. I cannot support that point of view.


The whole basis of the claim of the article is a misrepresentation of the timing aspects of digital audio.  This is caused by the author not understanding digitized systems.



Don't try to read more into this article than there is. There are many complexities of sound interpretation but those are a factor of the sounds that reach the ear and the complexities of speakers and room environments, not the electrical signal.