It has been proposed that the peripheral auditory system effectively applies a
filter bank to the acoustic signal reaching the ear drum. The output of this
filter bank, consisting of the analysis signals
, then
affects the information transmitted to the auditory organs of the brain. In
simulating the human auditory periphery, much scientific work to date thus
employs some form of filter bank to emulate the characteristics of this
proposed auditory bank. Some natural questions arise regarding this proposal: