The ability to maintain a conversation with one person while at a noisy cocktail party has often been used to illustrate a general characteristic of auditory selective attention, namely that perceivers' attention is usually directed to a particular set of sounds and not to others. Part of the cocktail party problem involves parsing co-occurring speech sounds and simultaneously integrating these...

This review presents an overview of a challenging problem in auditory perception, the cocktail party phenomenon, the delineation of which goes back to a classic paper by Cherry in 1953. In this review, we address the following issues: (1) human auditory scene analysis, which is a general process carried out by the auditory system of a human listener; (2) insight into auditory perception, which ...

The human auditory system uses a number of well-identified cues to segregate and separate individual sound sources in a complex acoustical environment. For example, researchers in auditory scene analysis have long identified cues such as common onset, correlated fluctuations in instantaneous amplitude and frequency, harmonicity, and common interaural time and amplitude differences as ways of id...

The ability to parse a complex auditory scene into perceptual objects is facilitated by a hierarchical auditory system. Successive stages in the hierarchy transform an auditory scene of multiple overlapping sources, from peripheral tonotopically based representations in the auditory nerve, into perceptually distinct auditory-object-based representations in the auditory cortex. Here, using magne...

Like humans, animals that use acoustic stimuli to perceive their world ought to be able to parse the auditory scene into functionally significant sounds. The ability to do so ought to have significant adaptive value when, for example, an animal can identify the sounds of a predator among other natural noises. In earlier work it was shown that a species of songbird, the European starling, can id...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 Auditory scene analysis and other models of speech perception . . . . . . 3 1.

In this paper, we explore the use of a graph algorithm called the normalized cut in order to organize prominent components of the auditory scene. We focus specifically on defining a time-constrained similarity metric. We show that such a metric can be successfully expressed in terms of the time and frequency masking phenomena and can be used to solve common problems in auditory scene analysis.

We propose a novel approach to auditory stream segregation which extracts individual sounds (auditory stream) from a mixture of sounds in auditory scene analysis. The HBSS (Harmonic-Based Stream Segregation) system is designed and developed by employing a multi-agent system. HBSS uses only harmonics as a clue to segregation and extracts auditory streams incrementally. When the tracer-generator ...