Re: Non-linearity of the human ear
The way many researchers fall down is that they mechanistically treat the human ear as a simple transducer and don't acknowledge that it's impossible to decouple the ear (or a suitably spatially-installed pair thereof) from its back-end - a rather sophisticated signal-processing unit called The Brain, which overlays a vast slew of adaptive filters on top of the basic physiological ear-response.
Example: many years ago I remember an even-more-ancient operator reliably receiving a morse [CW] signal in the presence of some other nearby and much-stronger signals. Rather than using the 'official' approach of a beat-frequency-oscillator to render the CW signal he wanted as an audible tone he'd turned off the BFO and was essentially using the receiver's background white-noise against which to 'beat' the signal - which appeared as variations in the receiver 'hiss'. His brain did the rest.
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