Degraded Time-Frequency Acuity to Time-Reversed Notes

Time-reversal symmetry breaking is a key feature of many classes of natural sounds, originating in the physics of sound production. While attention has been paid to the response of the auditory system to “natural stimuli,” very few psychophysical tests have been performed. We conduct psychophysical measurements of time-frequency acuity for stylized representations of “natural”-like notes (sharp attack, long decay) and the time-reversed versions of these notes (long attack, sharp decay). Our results demonstrate significantly greater precision, arising from enhanced temporal acuity, for such sounds over their time-reversed versions, without a corresponding decrease in frequency acuity. These data inveigh against models of auditory processing that include tradeoffs between temporal and frequency acuity, at least in the range of notes tested and suggest the existence of statistical priors for notes with a sharp-attack and a long-decay. We are additionally able to calculate a minimal theoretical bound on the sophistication of the nonlinearities in auditory processing. We find that among the best studied classes of nonlinear time-frequency representations, only matching pursuit, spectral derivatives, and reassigned spectrograms are able to satisfy this criterion.