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Tinnitus: An Abstract View Emphasizing Signal, Noise, and Their Discrimination
Abstract:
Most research on the hearing process and its pathologies is biological in nature. However, engineers work on similar problems, in particular signal detection, efficient information processing and noise suppression. On a more abstract level, hearing can also be treated as a discrimination task, something which is well known to statistics. The goal of this note is to explore the implications of these more abstract ideas: It merges that the signal-to-noise ratio and the construction of a suitable discrimination function are crucial elements of the hearing process. Hopefully such a theoretical point of view may facilitate a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved. Perception fallacies such as phantom sounds or optical illusions are not just interesting in their own right; they open up a direct path to the deeper workings of perceptual processes. In order to be accessible to researchers in the field, this note is rather non-technical.
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