These sources sit between a physical signal and what someone perceives. They cover consonance, the cochlea, directional sound and hidden 3D images. They often disagree about how much physics can explain.
How the cochlea computes (2024)
A Hacker News thread debating a blog article on how the ear analyzes sound.
Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs
A Hacker News thread discussing an explainer on neural audio codecs from Kyutai.
Resonate
A project page describing the Resonate algorithm for low-latency audio spectral analysis.
Toward a Sparse Interpretable Audio Codec
A proof-of-concept write-up of an audio codec that encodes sound as sparse events.
Harmony Explained
A paper deriving harmony from physics plus the computation of hearing.
Harmony Explained on Hacker News
A discussion disputing how far physics can explain what sounds good.
Music Theory for Programmers on Hacker News
A large discussion on whether music theory can be derived from first principles.
Music theory for programmers
A code-first walk from air pressure to scales, chords and tuning.
Autostereogram
A Wikipedia article explaining autostereograms, single images that hide a 3D scene.
Why is the crescent Moon sometimes lit on the bottom?
A NASA answer on why a crescent Moon can look like a U.
Hacker News comment thread on loudspeaker directionality
A small comment thread about why speakers beam, under a story on a laser-like speaker.
Making a rickroll laser:
A hobby write-up of a narrow-beam speaker built from ultrasonic transducers.