The hair cells in our inner ear are activated in response to specific frequencies, virtually identical to how an FFT operates.
There is then further processing attached to that, in the same way that we perceive colors rather than cones directly in our vision. With audio, we need to collapse entire series of overtones into a fundamental frequency with a timbre (color).
And specifically in the experiment linked, it's showing how the ear intelligently restores the missing fundamental.
But I don't believe there's any biological/neurological evidence to support that the ear detects periodic repetitions of an overall waveform, and that this explains the missing fundamental. To the contrary, how our hearing works biologically suggests that we are indeed performing something like FFT, but then applying sophisticated pattern recognition on it -- on the "FFT", not on the waveform.
The hair cells in our inner ear are activated in response to specific frequencies, virtually identical to how an FFT operates.
There is then further processing attached to that, in the same way that we perceive colors rather than cones directly in our vision. With audio, we need to collapse entire series of overtones into a fundamental frequency with a timbre (color).
And specifically in the experiment linked, it's showing how the ear intelligently restores the missing fundamental.
But I don't believe there's any biological/neurological evidence to support that the ear detects periodic repetitions of an overall waveform, and that this explains the missing fundamental. To the contrary, how our hearing works biologically suggests that we are indeed performing something like FFT, but then applying sophisticated pattern recognition on it -- on the "FFT", not on the waveform.