Let’s say the term ‘object’ may be characterised as a cognitive process that is coupled to properties like persistence over time, countability or forgeground background differentiation. An engineering approach of the digital era to these properties is connected to the notions of sampling and resolution. Roughly speaking the required temporal sampling in digital multimedia systems for the human visual domain is below 100 Hz, for the human audio domain it is in the range of 40.000Hz.
In response to a pure sound at a frequency below about 300 Hz, an auditory-nerve fiber fires action potentials at every cycle of stimulation and at a fixed phase [3,5]. Above 300 Hz the axon starts to skip cycles, but action potentials still occur at a preferred phase of the stimulus. […] Temporal information about the stimulus frequency is [] greatest for frequencies below 800 Hz, declines from 800 Hz to 4 kHz, and vanishes for still greater frequencies. In some species, such as the barn owl, phase locking can continue up to 10 kHz [8].
Source: Frequency decoding of periodically timed action potentials through distinct activity patterns in a random neural network, Tobias Reichenbach and A. J. Hudspeth
Ignoring the different underlying physiological and perceptual concepts the following questions arise.
Emerging from its higher temporal resolution – are there object like percepts in the audio domain that do not have an equivalent in the visual domain ? Or is this resolution only projected to spectral percepts like timbre, pitch, and spatial localisation?
Can objects emerge, persist and defocus on time scales smaller than 50ms ?