A recent finding of the inability of listeners to judge the order of three or four nonspeech sounds presented in a repetitive cycle is explained by the concept of stream segregation. Two experiments showed that at high presention rates of a short cycle of six tones (three high and three low), 5s invariably segregated the tone sequences into streams based on frequency and could perceive only those patterns relating elements of the same subjective stream.
Auditory Scene Analysis addresses the problem of hearing complex auditory environments, using a series of creative analogies to describe the process required of the human auditory system as it analyzes mixtures of sounds to recover descriptions of individual sounds. In a unified and comprehensive way, Bregman establishes a theoretical framework that integrates his findings with an unusually wide range of previous research in psychoacoustics, speech perception, music theory and composition, and computer modeling.
Bradford Books imprint
The auditory system appears to begin listening to an input with a bias toward hearing the input as a single stream, but it gradually accumulates evidence over a period of seconds which may lead to the input's being split into substreams. Several seconds of silence or of unpatterned noise slowly remove the bias of the mechanism in favor of these streams. These effects were demonstrated in experiments in which young adult listeners sped up sequences of tones until they split. The sequences varied in the number of tones packaged between recurrent "separators" (periods of silence or of white noise) and in the lengths of these separators.If a sequence of tones of different pitches is played rapidly enough, it seems to split perceptually into two or more concurrent substreams. Subgroups of tones closely related in frequency, or following a smooth trajectory in frequency, will form part of the same stream. The splitting increases when the subgroups are farther away in frequency or when the sequence is played faster (Bregman & Campbell, 1971;Heise & Miller, 1951;Miller & Heise, 1950; Van Noorden, Note 1). The splitting phenomenon may also be observed with repeating short cycles of speech sounds (Cole & Scott, 1973;Dorman, Cutting, & Raphael, 1975;Lackner & Goldstein, 1974).These effects are seen by the author (Bregman, 1978b; Bregman & Dannenbring, in press) as the product of an auditory "parsing" mechanism. In natural environments, the sounds emitted by different sources reach our ears, mixed together. The auditory system must group the acoustic
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.