Probably one of the better explanations of elementary psychoacoustics I have read, this article points out that we always hear at once more and less than a microphone can. Our auditory apparatus performs FFT operations on sound, resolving even the most complex sounds into stacks of sine waves. I also found interesting the idea that there is a significant delay between sound and our consciousness of it, around 6 milliseconds of more or less unconscious processing before we are aware of the sound.
The fact that our ears have what seems to be a tendency towards simplification and unification (as in the example cited in the paper of early reflections from a space being integrated into the acoustic richness of the perceived sound rather than being taken as the separated sonic phenomena they in fact are) means that ideally a composition technique ought to take this into account. A great deal of the "received wisdom" about orchestration for instance is almost an empirically derived version of some of this knowledge about sound, blending, space, masking and reflection but derived from trial and error rather than science.
Of course the object of the article is to promote a conception of acoustic fidelity but a knowledge of how sound is heard and processed in the brain can also lead to explorations of interesting kinds of illusion and infidelity as well. This is a particular interest of mine lately as synthetic sound nearly always needs to be placed in a virtual space to sound at its richest (and in addition I nearly always listen on headphones especially to extended works on account of the greater sense of detail and presence one can achieve without making too much noise).
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