Ryan wrote:


Well, maybe, I don't really know. I'd be surprised if some type of
math couldn't be rigged up that would do as good a job as a human.

Prepare, then, to be surprised. Our mechanisms for feature
extraction and interpretation remain largely a mystery. The
process is highly algorithmic and that is very different
than mathematical, although math can be employed in some
algorithmic process.

It's all analytical, and actually not too subjective. It will either
sound like a jet engine or not, and since the computer will "know"
what a jet engine sounds like thanks to the FFT and differential
analysis, it seems to me this shoud be as easy as asking a computer to
come up with a number that adds to 7 to make ten.

An FFT doesn't begin to disclose what you are looking for in
and of itself. It's no more than a view of the same data
with a different independant axis. It contains no
information at all about when things happen.

In any event, the ear brain does not do a Fourier analysis.
There are frequency dependant mechanisms but they are
totally ad hoc in terms of what nature found most useful for
subsequent analysis.

In a very real sense you are asking for an artificial ear
all the way through to the process of blind separation.
That problem remains a curiousity that researchers are
merely nibbling the edges of.

You might want to Google on "blind separation" to see how
much your problem involves that and how little progress has
been made.


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
simpler."

A. Einstein