Probing Auditory Scene Analysis

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Probing auditory scene analysis

In natural environments, the auditory system is typically confronted with a mixture of sounds originating from different sound sources. As sounds spread over time, the auditory system has to continuously decompose competing sounds into distinct meaningful auditory objects or “auditory streams” referring to certain sound sources. This decomposition work, which was termed by Albert Bregman as “Auditory scene analysis” (ASA), involves two kinds of grouping to be done. Grouping based on simultaneous cues, such as harmonicity and on sequential cues, such as similarity in acoustic features over time. Understanding how the brain solves these tasks is a fundamental challenge facing auditory scientist. In recent years, the topic of ASA was broadly investigated in different fields of auditory research, including a wide range of methods, studies in different species, and modeling. Despite the advance in understanding ASA, it still proves to be a major challenge for auditory research. This includes verifying whether experimental findings are transferable to more realistic auditory scenes. A central approach in understanding ASA is the use of certain stimulus parameters that produce an ambiguous percept. The advantage of such an approach is that different perceptual organizations can be studied without varying physical stimulus parameters. Additionally, the perception of ambiguous stimuli can be volitionally controlled by intention or task. By using this one can mirror real hearing situations where listeners intent to identify and to localize auditory sources. Recently it was also found that in classical auditory streaming sequences perceptual ambiguity was not restricted to but was observed over a broad range of stimulus parameters. The proposed Research Topic pursues to bring together scientist in the different fields of auditory research whose work addresses the issue of perceptual ambiguity. Researchers were welcome to contribute experimental reports, computational modeling, and reviews that consider auditory ambiguity in its modality specific characteristics as well as in comparison to visual ambiguous figures. The overall goal of contributions was to consider the experimental findings from the perspective of real auditory scenes. In a broader sense, the Research Topic was open for contributions which are related to the issue of active listening in complex scenes.
Auditory Scene Analysis

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.
Effects of Anthropogenic Noise on Animals

Over the past several years, many investigators interested in the effects of man-made sounds on animals have come to realize that there is much to gain from studying the broader literature on hearing sound and the effects of sound as well as data from the effects on humans. It has also become clear that knowledge of the effects of sound on one group of animals (e.g., birds or frogs) can guide studies on other groups (e.g., marine mammals or fishes) and that a review of all such studies together would be very useful to get a better understanding of the general principles and underlying cochlear and cognitive mechanisms that explain damage, disturbance, and deterrence across taxa. The purpose of this volume, then, is to provide a comprehensive review of the effects of man-made sounds on animals, with the goal of fulfilling two major needs. First, it was thought to be important to bring together data on sound and bioacoustics that have implications across all taxa (including humans) so that such information is generally available to the community of scholars interested in the effects of sound. This is done in Chaps. 2-5. Second, in Chaps. 6-10, the volume brings together what is known about the effects of sound on diverse vertebrate taxa so that investigators with interests in specific groups can learn from the data and experimental approaches from other species. Put another way, having an overview of the similarities and discrepancies among various animal groups and insight into the “how and why” will benefit the overall conceptual understanding, applications in society, and all future research.