Is perceiving sound really the same for each individual?

I have been contemplating this for a while now and have been wondering - Is perceiving sound really the same for each individual? I'm not talking about tastes in music genres, or styles, I mean the way each individual actually perceives music and sound.

For example, some individuals may think a particular headphone, DAC, amp is harsh, warm, dull etc, while others think that a particular Headphone, amp, DAC sounds extraordinary. Sure, individual tastes has something to do with it, but being that each individual is different physiologically, could it be that sound is perceived differently because of perhaps the shape of one's ear canal or perhaps their genes? I cannot imagine each individual's eardrum and ear canal are exactly the same. Could this be the reason, or at least part of the reason that different individuals perceive sound in different ways?

For example, say an individual has a certain shape for their ear canal, while another individual has a slightly different shape for their ear canal. Could the way that sound waves enter each individuals different ear canal shapes affect the way sound is perceived? Has there ever been any scientific testing on this? Is it even possible to scientifically test this?

Theoretically, I would think that humans should perceive sound and sound waves the same way as each and every individual - but clearly that is not the case. Some headphones sounds great to some people, while that same headphone may sound harsh, dull, bassy, etc. to another individual.

So is it possible, the shape of the ear canal, the eardrum, genetics and other human characteristics that vary slightly from individual to individual affect the way sound waves are interpreted by different individuals?

I have been contemplating this for a while. Like I said, I am not speaking of musical tastes, rather I am speaking of the way sound waves enter the ear canal and ear drum. Is it possible that the slight differences between each individual affect the way sound is perceived?

 

Even if all ears are born equal, it seems highly unlikely that they remain so after a decade or four. I know mine aren't.

However, equipment-selective hearing may be harder to explain. Or maybe not: I can appreciate, if not understand, how my own particular hearing deficiencies and sensitivities can cause me to dislike sound that is acceptable, or even considered superior, by others.

Sadly, actually trying to understand the physical and mental aspects of hearing is taboo among many so-called audiophiles. That's a shame: I don't see how it can do anything but help and enhance our experience. Especially when one considers the huge mental effort that is required to even begin to understand digital electronics!

Recently read: an instructive article on how the ear is a series of equalisers and compressors leading to a DAC. And no, it is not an analogy. I'll find the link if I can, but might have seen it here, so if anyone posts it ahead of me, that'll be nice.

 

thanks Thad

 

Here's that article from my bookmarks. Turns out it was a Sound On Sound piece. I've been trusting Sound on Sound more than the hifi rags since back in the day when I was still buying my monthly fix of glossy paper (which, come to think of it, probably cost more than my my current monthly broadband costs!).

How The Ear Works

 

Thad's link goes into the some of the other anatomical differences in the ear, muscular stiffness regulating mechanical compression, cochlea differences that regulate sensitivity and frequency range. These differences aren't so easily adjusted to, but I think there are more similarities than differences in perception.

I like to look at this problem as related to binaural:

• The ears, head, and shoulders on a person affect incoming sound. The head blocks frequencies between two ears. The canals, concha, and rest of the body amplify incoming sound.
• The amplification is frequency and direction dependent, as is the acoustic shadow. Timing differences between the sound arriving at the two ears are also angle dependent. The brain makes use of these inputs to determine source location.
  
• From a sound source in any space, the frequency response that is at the eardrum is not identical between people. Neither is the timing difference, or FR shadowing between ears.

In spite of the differences, two different people can hear a sound as coming from the same place, even though the inputs are different. Binaural recordings capturing the direction for one person place position well, but generalize to other people poorly. How does this happen?
The brain must make sense of the differences made by the listener's own body, the ears it must live with. For other ears, it shows a more limited adaptive ability.

Other sensory inputs help calibrate the brain, the things that you see making the sounds. Darin gives some examples of the mental adjustments with his virtual speaker software. Crossfeed and Head Tracking

In short, the sound waves are not the same, but the brain can cancel out differences.

Headphone listening adds a complication, the headphone is not independent of the listener, it is coupled to the head and interferes with the natural amplification of the ear. The stimulus is also different, but not the natural way that the brain is used to. You have issues such as seal affecting bass, and peaks in the treble response. I think the variation is more evident with IEMs, they bypass or interfere with all the natural hearing mechanisms. Coupling volume might be even more a factor even if seal quality is good, peaks from the resonating air in the ear canal are more evident in measurements.

 

thank you briskly for that post!

I would like to hear @purrin 's take on this

 

I'm sure we all share a major part of our aural reality (or any other reality, I suppose). If we did not, then even conversation would be pretty tough and... imagine trying to learn or teach music! I too, though, wonder how exact it is. And it certainly changes with age, as our personal frequency-response curves change.

I bought a DVD on learning a particular Indian language, actually quite a few years ago. A few lessons in, came "there are four sounds: k, k, k and k. However hard I tried, I could not distinguish any one of them as being different. Of course, I still can't. The speakers of the several languages which have those sounds, of course, have no problem. I wonder what happens when they, of only through age, get HF hearing loss? I suppose, having once known, they work it out, as well as they can, from context.

Now, I have problems, against any sort of background noise, telling several different consonants, in English, from one another. This is just one way in which my hearing, as an example, differs from that of many of the readers of this thread.

 

I honestly don't see how "perception" could be anything other than an idividual value,

I suppose if you were able to find someone with exactly the same physiology as yourself the chances that they might perceive things closer to the way you do , but there isn't really any way to predict the circumstances that develop the values that our idividual perceptiveness call upon istantaneously upon occurences.

Now .we can probably agree upon the descriptive values used to describe something, but we can't actually predict what it was that led their "perception" to that specific conclusion ,at that specific time !

(This seemed like a logical explanation I came upon as I was typing it anyway. He,he,he)