Speech remains understandable at high levels because timing carries formant info

Evidence

From Figures 7.16 and 7.19 one may conclude that the frequency resolution of hearing might be lost at levels above 60 dB due to neural saturation. This is not true, as we know from our everyday experience that speech with levels of even 100 dB is still understandable. An evident source of information is the temporal pattern of neural activation, and indeed Young and Sachs (1979) show that a combination of spectral and temporal neural patterns contains the information of vocal formants even at high frequencies. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 799

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing theme that signal vs. noise and redundancy sustain communication — the temporal encoding is an information-theoretic redundancy mechanism alongside the auditory soundscape work.
• DEEPTHINKING: A concrete, non-obvious mechanism: neural saturation destroying spectral resolution would naively kill speech intelligibility, but temporal encoding redundantly preserves it — a paradigm of how biological systems achieve robustness against component limits.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 799