Oliver Sacks Quote
Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations or sound: thus a very low C (below the bottom of the piano scale) might be heard as a low C or a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An octave below this, we would hear only fluttering; an octave above this (thirty-two vibrations a second), we would hear a low note with no fluttering. The perception of tone within the hearing range is a sort of synthetic judgment or construct of the normal auditory system (see Helmholtz’s The Sensations of Tone, first published in 1862).
Oliver Sacks
Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations or sound: thus a very low C (below the bottom of the piano scale) might be heard as a low C or a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An octave below this, we would hear only fluttering; an octave above this (thirty-two vibrations a second), we would hear a low note with no fluttering. The perception of tone within the hearing range is a sort of synthetic judgment or construct of the normal auditory system (see Helmholtz’s The Sensations of Tone, first published in 1862).