How the cochlea computes (2024)

The title seems a little click-baity and basically wrong. Gabor transforms, wavelet transforms, etc are all generalizations of the fourier transform, which give you a spectrum analysis at each point in time

The content is generally good but I'd argue that the ear is indeed doing very Fourier-y things.

Agree on the click-baity part, but as for being wrong... not if we're really pedantic. As you've said, Gabor and wavelet are basically generalizations of the Fourier Transform, not actually Fourier Transforms. Just like FS/DFT/DTFT aren't really Fourier Transforms either.

On one corner of the square, you have Fourier Transforms, which are essentially contiguous and infinite. On the opposite corner, you have the DFT, which is both finite (or periodic) and discrete. Hearing is more akin to a Fourier Series, which is finite/periodic but contiguous. That's probably not what the article aims at addressing, though.

But then wavelet transforms are different from Fourier Series again, because you have shifted and stretched shapes (some of them quite weird) instead of sinusoids.

But yeah, colloquially, I agree, the ear is indeed doing very Fourier-y things.

It's a graduate student writing a journal club article about the Lewicki 2002 paper, which is very good, and whose abstract states the idea more precisely: "The form of the code depends on sound class, resembling a Fourier transformation when optimized for animal vocalizations and a wavelet transformation when optimized for non-biological environmental sounds"