Acknowledgments

The kernel of this work emerged from a long-standing interest I have had in exploring analogies that exist between psychoacoustics and imaging and Fourier optics to improve my intuitive understanding of hearing. Early during my PhD studies I had realized that such analogies tend to be fragmentary, where they appear in print, or altogether nonexistent. Fortunately, I had the chance to delve into this question in the context of a journal club presentation I titled “Optical Hearing”, on 5 October, 2017 at Macquarie University. Thus, I am indebted to the large group of participants in my talk and for this group for sharing their own presentations that had undoubtedly provided me with background knowledge and motivation that had helped me to crystallize my own ideas.

I would like to thank Jörg Buchholz, for giving me the necessary freedom to explore these uncharted territories while working on my PhD during that period in 2017–2018, and for providing the opportunity to be immersed in this research in the first place.

A big thanks goes to Nicholas Haywood for his insightful suggestion to explore aliasing as a proxy for discrete processing. While he was unavailable for direct cooperation, the results garnered from this original suggestion have gone a long way.

I am also thankful to David McAlpine for hearing out the idea in its initial and very raw form (along with Jörg Buchholz), and for getting me to pay attention early on to the inferior colliculus rather than to the auditory cortex as the main auditory hub.

Many thanks for Gojko Obradovic for reviewing the text and providing invaluable comments throughout.

Special thanks to Fabrice Bardy and Macarena Paz Bowen for audiological help in two measurements and for their general encouragement in these early stages.

Thanks also to Jody Ghani for her remarkable patience with transforming some abstract ideas into original technical drawings.

An early source of inspiration was a presentation given by James B. Lee, who provocatively tied together several ideas in optics, nuclear physics, and concert hall acoustics. He held quite unlikely talks in the 2016 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Honolulu (Lee, 2016a; Lee, 2016b), which attempted to conceptually link optics and acoustics in a way that was both fresh and insightful.

Sometimes people say things that resonate and can be later recognized in a completely different context in life. Such was something that my friend Ofer Meir said, who has also taken it upon himself to ensure that this work would see the light of day much sooner than it would have been without him. Thus, I am deeply grateful for his friendship and support.

The presence of close and loving friends throughout the process has been indispensable. Kelly Miles, who provided early inspiration and ongoing enthusiasm, Ophir Ilzetzki for invigorating discussions and sincere curiosity along the discovery process, Dotan Perlstein for his unyielding encouragement and for making sure that my feet remain on firm scientific ground, Jan Tomáš Matys for his unflinching confidence and moral support of this work, Augusto Bravo for his endless openness for radical thinking and many fascinating conversations about science, Michael Yang for his firm friendship and taking this project seriously all along, and for Diogo Flores, who drove me with his excitement during the early parts of the work.

For their valuable advice at key moments along the way I am indebted to Timothy Beechey, Andrew Bell, Yaniv Ganor, Ami Goren, Barak Mann, Yehuda Spira, and Eduardo Vistisen.

For keeping things close at different points throughout the writing process and for their sincere support and friendship, I am grateful to Fadwa AlNafjan, Camilla Althoehn, Emily Arday, Javier Badajoz-Davila, Jerome Barkhan, John Beerends, Isabelle Boisvert, Ammalia Duvall, Jack Garzonio, Gady Goldsobel, Julia Gutz and Paul Springthorpe, Sharon Israel, Brent Kirkwood, Emilija Klovaitė, Rèmi Marchand, Jason Mikiel-Hunter, Juan Carlos Negrete, Allie O'Connor, Anders Pedersen, Heivet Hernandez Perez, Claudiu Pop, Matthieu Recugnat, Mariana Reis, Mariana Roslyng-Jensen, Ana Ruediger, Jeremy Rutman, Greg Stewart, Kramer Thompson, Lindsey Van Yper, Sarah Verhulst, Jay and Jane Woo, Jaime Undurraga, Gil Zilberstein and Stèphanie Èthier, and the late Liviu Sigler.

I am grateful to my sister, Oriyan Miller, and my brother-in-law, Roee Miller, for their continuous engagement, constructive questions, and much encouragement at numerous points throughout the discovery process.

And, finally, a huge thanks to my mother, Vivian Savitri, whose involvement and trust in this work have been essential from the early development of the ideas, which could have not been nearly as peaceful and resolute without her ongoing dedication to this project.

This work is standing on the shoulders of numerous scholars in hearing, acoustics, optics, communication engineering, information theory, signal processing, physics, neuroscience, and biology, without whom this treatise could have not been written. The comprehensive bibliography of this treatise is a testimony of my deep appreciation for their work that is frequently studded with unmistakable ingenuity. Of special help were the textbooks by Brian C. J. Moore (2013) about psychological acoustics and by James O. Pickles (2012) about the physiology of hearing, as well as the entire Springer series of handbooks on auditory sciences, edited by Richard R. Fay and Arthur N. Popper, which has been an indispensable source of knowledge of all things auditory. Two additional texts that provided an exceptionally useful overview of the historical and current state of hearing science from original perspectives were by Andrew Bell (2005) and Richard F. Lyon (2018). A book by Howard L. Resnikoff (1989) provided a unique point of view that related perception (mainly vision) to information theory and served as early inspiration. Finally, non-hearing texts that were used extensively were books about communication theory by Leon W. Couch II (2013) and Fourier optics by Joseph W. Goodman (2017). I was fortunate enough to attend a semester of Stephen G. Lipson's optical physics class in the Technion back in 1998, which evidently stuck for longer than I had realized at the time. The textbook of that course has thus remained an important reference throughout my writing (Lipson et al., 2010).

I could not have carried out this research without access to the Macquarie University Library, and to a lesser extent the Technion and Haifa University libraries. My gratitude goes to all the librarians that have worked behind the scenes.

References

Lee, James B. Sound has size: Stages of concert halls. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140 (4): 3379, 2016a.

Lee, James B. Nonstationary signals, holograms, and concert halls. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140 (4): 3450–3450, 2016b.

Lipson, Ariel, Lipson, Stephen G, and Lipson, Henry. Optical Physics. Cambridge University Press, 4th edition, 2010.