The ear cannot sense a tone’s absolute phase but does sense phase differences.

Evidence

To fully represent a pure tone, then, one need specify the amplitude, frequency, and the phase. For the purposes of this chapter, we consider the phase of the pure tone to be zero degrees, as the ear cannot sense the phase of a single pure tone. However, the ear can sense phase differences between tones and across the two ears, and so we should not always neglect the phase of pure tones. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 165

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly does ‘sensing phase differences across the ears’ enable — interaural time differences for localization — and down to what threshold?

Related

• The human ear is largely insensitive to signal phase (similarity 0.87)
• Two ear sounds can differ in phase while differing little in amplitude. (similarity 0.87)
• Phase shifts between the ears can substitute for onset time delays in detecting sounds. (similarity 0.85)
• The ear is far less sensitive to phase than to amplitude of frequency components (similarity 0.84)
• Piano timbre would be unstable if we heard phase changes. (similarity 0.83)
• The ear resolves low-frequency direction by measuring phase shift (similarity 0.83)
• Acoustical interference is non-minimum-phase but less audible than resonances. (similarity 0.83)
• What the ear perceives can diverge from sound’s physical components. (similarity 0.83)
• The ear’s just-noticeable amplitude difference depends on signal type, level, and frequency (similarity 0.83)
• Accurate hearing cannot be acutely sensitive to the relative phase of partials. (similarity 0.82)
• Difference noise generated by ear nonlinearities can be heard before the test tone itself (similarity 0.82)
• Humans hear spectral content, not waveform shape or phase shifts (similarity 0.82)
• Phase relations of partials do not affect perceived timbre. (similarity 0.82)
• Spectrum magnitude, not phase, drives the perceived timbre of a sound (similarity 0.82)
• Phase-based directional hearing works only below about 743 hertz (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• The power spectrum is blind to the relative phase of a sound’s components #expands (0.95) — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 339
• Reversing a tone’s phase in one ear lowers its detection threshold in noise #exemplifies (0.90) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1621
• The ear is far less sensitive to phase than to amplitude of frequency components #expands (0.85) — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 452