Well, I disagree on a number of points, but I'll start with a field of
which I know a lot, namely recognizing minute changes in pitch.

I play several instruments, and I'd say I would be able to "hear", or
"regocnize" a change of a 20th of a seminote, or 10 times more sensitive
than you presume. If you're trained (piano tuners, organ tuners) or with
"perfect pitch" sense, you'll be able to recognize maybe a change of a
50th of a seminote.

You would, in a race care hear the "rate of change" in pitch more than
"aboslute pitch", and a normally musical ear will draw massive info from
a changing engine "tone". You would not translate pitch to speed, but
you'd translate rate of change to speed.

It is difficult to describe engine noise as frequency, since you hear
overtones of the base frequency. An engine with 12000 revs/min equals a
base frequency of 200hz, 20 hz lower than the "little a" of 220 hz. This
area is by far the most sensitive area of an ear, and we would have the
most resolution in this area. Our ears are most sensitive in the
"speech" frequencies.

If you make these assumptions, you'd come up with a hugely effective
instrument for speed reading. If you don't go faster with sound than
without, you need to practice your ear. One way to do this is to stick a
piece of carton over your in-car rev meter, so that the only input in
the speed dept would be the sound, and you would HAVE to use your ear.

With practice you will be able to judge your speed accurately to 1 or 2
km/h, and this would be a perfect tool for racing. You would not be able
to say "I'm now running down the straight at 301km/h", but you would be
able to say "I'm now running at 3kmh slower than my target speed at this
point". Again, not an absolute reading of speed, but a very good
relative reading of your speed.

And you're right: Grip is changing all the time, and this is where a
real car would give you heaps of info, but the sim gives you very
little. This is probably why it is hard to push very hard on a sim car,
because you only get sound from tires, and no G-pull, no vibration. In
real life you would also get much more info from the tyre screech than
in a sim, since the sound will accurately describe what happens with a tyre.

---A---

On 12.03.2008 05:12, * alexti wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:05:41 +0100, Asgeir Nesoen wrote:
>
>> I disagree; I would say that the sensation of speed actually *is* one of
>> the aspects of racing that may be simulated properly.
>>
>> What kind of sensory input do you have when out on the RL track? You see
>> things passing by, you hear your engine sings, you see your rev meter,
>> you feel the rumble. Of those, I'd choose rev meter and "engine sings"
>> any day, and both of those can be simulated properly, given a decent
>> sound system.
>>
>> You read your speed with your ears, and you use your eyes to place the
>> car on the track, you use your eyes. Loads and loads of drivers out
>> there have no feel, or perception of speed whatsoever, and this stems
>> from a lack of sensitivity in their ears. I always said that a truly
>> great racing driver must also have a musical sense...
> I wonder how well you can really judge the speed by the sound. It seems
> to work well at low speeds, but at high speeds it's much more difficult.
> Human ear apparently has logarithmic sensitivity to the frequency, but
> the speed depends on revs linearly. For example, there's about 1000
> difference between C# and D in 11th octave. That's about 6%. Considering
> that good musician can likely tell about half of variation, that 3%. At
> 300km/h it's 9km/h. Not too bad, but probably not good enough for driving
> at the top level. And that's assuming that one is in perfect environment
> for listening. Driving sim without sound is kind of strange, I felt
> uncomfortable without it, but I could go at practically the same speed as
> with the sound.
>
> In a sense, I'm not sure that feeling the speed is even important. It's
> not like it's written at every corner at what speed it should be taken. I
> think it's more of a judgement of the rate of change of the angle of your
> viewpoint in comparison to the curvature of the turn. It sounds kind of
> weird, but one can drive the track he has never seen quite fast and in
> this case knowing one's speed doesn't help one much.
>
>> A novice driver with no fear for his life would go too fast in RL too,
>> because the skill to read speed comes with practice, practice, practice.
>> Judging speed is one of the key factors of becoming a racing driver, and
>> it is the key to race simulations well, too.
>>
>> However, what you *can't* feel is the minute changes of grip, the
>> details of the racing surface, the tyre response and changes. FFB has
>> improved this in the front axis area, but this is still the main problem
>> and shortcoming of a sim. My main gripe right now is the ability to read
>> what takes place at the rear end of my cars.
> And in real live you don't even know how much traction will be in the
> coming corner (and by the time you arrive there it may be too late) - it
> mostly comes from experience in recognising what you see (probably it's
> more applicable to rallying than to track racing, where the traction
> rarely changes dramatically).
>> All this comes from reading the Gs you pull, and this can never be
>> simulated per se; we'll have to wait for that back-of-your-skull
>> connector to simulate that.
> I wonder how much one feels G directly and how much through the pressure
> on the body parts. The latter can probably simulated relatively easily -
> it's not necessary to have 1:1 pressure scale.