CLARITY, COCKTAILS, AND CONCERTS:LISTENING IN CONCERT HALLS

摘要

The key to understanding musicalacoustics lies in the extraordinaryability of the human ear andbrain to extract a wealth of preciseinformation from a complex and oftenchaotic sound field. A human ear has only about 3,500 sound-sensing hair cells, each capable offiring no faster than 1000 times per second. They areattached to a frequency sensitive mechanical filter with aselectivity of about one part in five. Yet with this meagerdata we can tune instruments to one part in a thousand,choose to listen to any one of several simultaneous conver-sations in a noisy room (the cocktail party effect), or knowwhich instrument played each note in a string quartet.