The possible role of the cochlear frequency-position map in auditory signal coding.
The frequency-position map in the cochlea is considered as part of a signal decomposition mechanism whose purpose is redundancy reduction and information compression of auditory stimuli. A logarithmic-type frequency distribution is analytically derived from a heuristic model of the autocorrelation function of auditory signals and confronted with empirical data from the cat cochlea. It is argued that the logarithmic organization of frequency along the cochlea is designed to extract the maximum amount of information with the minimum number of hair cells.
D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D002415:Cats; D003051:Cochlea / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D008954:Models, Biological