As you say - a
paper published in June of ‘21 reports that subjects can detect half a millisecond delay in sound. And for binaural hearing which our brains use for things like sound location and selectively picking out sounds in an auditory scene, our auditory brain functions at the level of 10’s of microseconds.
‘Of Sound Mind’, a very approachable book by Nina Kraus subtitled ‘How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World’ and was published in 2021, has citations for a host of the published literature. Kraus heads the
Brainvolts lab at Northwestern University. Among the criteria she set out for her research were
- a biological approach that could reveal sound processing so subtle we aren’t even conscious of it.
- be able to capture how the sound mind processes sound ingredients like pitch, timing, timbre, …
- to get this information without requiring active participation from the listener.