THE DISSERTATION BLOG

In the previous post, I argued that many of the structures humans use to organize sound are oscillatory (e.g., partials, pitch, melody, chords). If we want to understand more about the way neural networks organize sound, and how it aligns with our own organizational schemas, then we might look for these structures. This blog post series focuses on the most primitive such structure: partials (narrowband oscillatory components with preferred frequencies). The first layer of a c

The figure below shows three representations of the same sound wave: a brief prose description, a spectrogram, and a sequence of numbers. The prose hypothesizes a chord progression, a description of its writer’s perceptual experience of the sound wave. The spectrogram shows how acoustic energy in the sound wave is distributed across frequencies over time. Both are human-legible representations of music, each offering its own strategy for recovering semantic structures from a