How the brain makes sense of complex auditory scenes

Everyday listening involves a complex interplay between the ear, which transduces sound energy into neural responses, and the brain, which makes sense of these inputs. Historically, research on the ear tended to ignore the fact that what we can perceive in sound depends on what task the brain is engaged by, while research on cortical processing of sound ignored the complexity and sophistication of how the ear works. This paper explores how everyday perceptual abilities depend jointly on how the ear encodes information (and individual differences in the fidelity with which it does so) and how attention and other state dependent variables change the information we perceive.