Modeling the auditory organization of speech - a summary and some comments

The preceding three chapters have been concerned with the issues arising as a result of the inconvenient fact that our ears are rarely presented with the sound of a single speaker in isolation, but more often with a combination of several speech and nonspeech sounds which may also have been further altered by the acoustic environment. Faced with such a mixture, the listener evidently needs to consider each source separately, and this process of information segregation is known as auditory organization or auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990). Pure curiosity as well as the possibility of applications in automatic signal inerpretation drive us to investigate auditory scene analysis through psychological experiments and computational modeling.