Audio-visual analogies

* preliminary draft *

Certain principles and accompanying phenomena of sensory acquistion of information are most readily apprehended from the visual system. Such principles and phenomena are, e.g.,

• projection of external objects on the primary sensory array of receptors, providing primay excitation;
• reduction of the primary excitation to contours on a first stage of processing;
• hierarchical processing of the information provided by contours, i.e., formation of sensory objects such as virtual contours and Gestalt
• occurrence of "illusions" and afterimages.

It was little appreciated in the past that auditory perception essentially is based on the same principles, and that certain auditory phenomena can be regarded as analogous to those found in vision. The audio-visual analogies are crucially dependent on the notion that the ear is a Fourier analyzer, i.e., that auditory perception is governed by peripheral analysis of the sound spectrum and subsequent "spectral contourization".

Several of the audio-visual analogies were outlined and discussed in [76], [93], [87], [96], [101], [104] (see also topic auditory acquisition of information).

main page