[ijl]

Using an image algorithm to process audio reminds me of Jeff Hawkins' arguments in On Intelligence, specifically in arguing that the brain processes all types of input in the same way of recognizing a pattern of activation within a sequence. Very interesting book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence

[mjn]

The way non-biological (i.e. mathematical, engineering) analyses are conducted has a substantial degree of unification as well. A typical engineering text focused on signal processing will develop an analysis method and then show example applications to audio, to images, to bridge resonance, to electronic circuits, etc. Things do get more specific as you dig further into domain-specific features and heuristics, but there's a large common foundation.

The usefulness of the kinds of experiments in this post, imo, is to investigate whether some things developed as domain-specific features actually belong more in the common foundation part. Sometimes something will be developed initially in computer-music or computer-vision not because it's really music or vision specific, but just due to where a particular person happened to be working. Or where research funding was allocated, for that matter. A funding trick computer-music people like doing lately is to apply their algorithms to bioinformatics as a way of funding research in their real domain of interest.

The next step, of course, would be to try to determine if these image-processing techniques already do exist in audio processing, just under a different name, or in some kind of variant.

[doctoboggan]

Yeah, I was thinking about this algorithm because I realized how much my brain uses the visual system to solve non visual problems. Maybe I am more of a visual thinker than others but I often visualize abstract concepts naturally.

I find it amazing that the brain can accept and process large amounts of information if it is just presented in a coherent visual way. Imagine looking at an image vs a printout of the pixel values. Same data but one is designed to be processed by humans.

[fluidcruft]

Recruiting the visual areas of the brain to process information is actually not a strong support for the argument that information processing in other regions of the brain is organized similarly--if it were, processing could be recruited elsewhere and you would not perceive it as "visual".

[doctoboggan]

> Recruiting the visual areas of the brain to process information is actually not a strong support for the argument that information processing in other regions of the brain is organized similarly

Good point. I guess I was trying to say that non-visual information processing in the brain is more than just organized similarly to visual processing, in some cases the brain actually uses the visual system to process non-visual information.

[aswanson]

I keep seeing this book referenced; need to check it out.