How Your Ears Do Maths Better Than Mathematicians  When you
listen to music, when its waves of sound collide with your ear,
you don’t hear a wall of sound. A great deal of information
might travel in a sound wave, and if that sound wave was
actually a giant wave of water rushing onto a beach, you might
expect to feel it as a big shove like any other big wave of
water coming in from the ocean. Except that’s not what happens
when this particular wave hits you.  Standing there ankle deep
in the surf, you brace for it to crash against your body, but
when it does arrive, it’s not a “hit” at all. Instead, you feel
a hundred different things at once, all on different parts of
your body. Some places it’s a cool brushing, others it soft slap
or the feeling of a light sunburn. And then the wave is passed.
Of course, that’s not how waves of water work. But it is how
sound waves work, at least when they’re introduced to a human
ear. Instead of a wall of noise, your ear perceives a variety of
different frequencies. Thos