[patrickthebold]

I think I might be missing something basic, but if you actually wanted to do a Fourier transform on the sound hitting your ear, wouldn't you need to wait your entire lifetime to compute it? It seems pretty clear that's not what is happening, since you can actually hear things as they happen.

[bonoboTP]

Yes, for the vanilla Fourier transform you have to integrate from negative to positive infinity. But more practically you can put put a temporally finite-support window function on it, so you only analyze a part of it. Whenever you see a 2d spectrogram image in audio editing software, where the audio engineer can suppress a certain range of frequencies in a certain time period they use something like this.

It's called the short-time Fourier transform (STFT).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform

[kragen]

Yeah. But a really annoying thing about the STFT is that its temporal resolution is independent of frequency, so you either have to have shitty temporal resolution at high frequencies or shitty frequency resolution at low ones, compared to the human ear. So in Audacity I keep having to switch back and forth between window sizes.

[IshKebab]

Yes exactly. This is a classic "no cats and dogs don't actually rain from the sky" article.

Nobody who knows literally anything about signal processing thought the ear was doing a Fourier transform. Is it doing something like a STFT? Obviously yes and this article doesn't go against that.

[xeonmc]

You’ll also need to have existed and started listening before the beginning of time, forever and ever. Amen.

[cherryteastain]

Not really, just as we can create spectrograms [1] for a real time audio feed without having to wait for the end of the recording by binning the signal into timewise chunks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram

[IshKebab]

Those use the Short-Time Fourier Transform, which is very much like what the ear does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform