A listener is thought to be able to organise musical notes into groups within musical streams/voices. A stream segment is a relatively short coherent sequence of tones that is separated horizontally from co-sounding streams and, vertically from neighbouring musical sequences. This paper presents a novel algorithm that discovers musical stream segments in symbolic musical data. The proposed algo...

This study evaluates the role of item predictability in auditory temporal coherence. Thirteen normal-hearing subjects were required to hold together long tonal sequences as single strings of notes. Temporal and spectral predictability of successive notes in a sequence varied as a function of experimental condition. As the frequency separation of the notes in the sequence increased, the subjects...

Two auditory phenomena--stream segregation and illusory continuity through a wide-band noise interruption--were studied to determine whether the same principles of perceptual organization applied to both. A cycle was formed of a repeating alternation of two short bursts of narrow-band noise (NBN), one centered at a high frequency (H) and the other at a low frequency (L), with shorter bursts of ...

The brain is constantly faced with the challenge of organizing acoustic input from multiple sound sources into meaningful auditory objects or perceptual streams. The present study examines the neural bases of auditory stream formation using neuromagnetic and behavioral measures. The stimuli were sequences of alternating pure tones, which can be perceived as either one or two streams. In the fir...

This study explored the extent to which sequential auditory grouping affects the perception of temporal synchrony. In Experiment 1, listeners discriminated between 2 pairs of asynchronous "target" tones at different frequencies, A and B, in which the B tone either led or lagged. Thresholds were markedly higher when the target tones were temporally surrounded by "captor tones" at the A frequency...

Stream segregation is the process by which the auditory system disentangles the mixture of sound inputs into discrete sources that cohere across time. The length of time required for this to occur is termed the "buildup" period. In the current study, we used the buildup period as an index of how quickly sounds are segregated into constituent parts. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that st...

The ability to select sound streams from background noise becomes challenging with age, even with normal peripheral auditory functioning. Reduced stream segregation ability has been reported in older compared to younger adults. However, the reason why there is a difference is still unknown. The current study investigated the hypothesis that automatic sound processing is impaired with aging, whi...

The build-up of auditory stream segregation refers to the notion that sequences of alternating A and B sounds initially tend to be heard as a single stream, but with time appear to split into separate streams. The central assumption in the analysis of this phenomenon is that streaming sequences are perceived as one stream at the beginning by default. In the present study, we test the validity o...

Auditory stream segregation (or streaming) is a phenomenon in which 2 or more repeating sounds differing in at least 1 acoustic attribute are perceived as 2 or more separate sound sources (i.e., streams). This article selectively reviews psychophysical and computational studies of streaming and comprehensively reviews more recent neurophysiological studies that have provided important insights ...