A procedure to estimate the relative contribution of "A" and "B" tones for a stream-segregation task is described. Listeners detected a delay in the penultimate A tone in an A-B-A-B sequence of tones. For small A-B frequency separations, for most listeners, classification models based on both the A and B tones were superior to models based on just the A tones. For large frequency separations, m...

This contribution addresses the influence of voice similarity on a shadowing experiment. Two groups of participants (implicit-knowledge and novelvoice) had to shadow a target voice under two conditions, i.e. (1) when the target voice and the distracter voice were acoustically similar and (2) when they were dissimilar. The error rates did not differ significantly between the two groups, but for ...

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...

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...

UNLABELLED Stream segregation enables a listener to disentangle multiple competing sequences of sounds. A recent study from our laboratory demonstrated that cortical neurons in anesthetized cats exhibit spatial stream segregation (SSS) by synchronizing preferentially to one of two sequences of noise bursts that alternate between two source locations. Here, we examine the emergence of SSS along ...

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 ...

Three-quarters of the world’s crayfish fauna are found in the US and Canada. Small natural ranges, habitat disturbance, and introduced crayfish species threaten many species, and nearly 1⁄2 are imperiled. Naturally small ranges are considered the leading factor for crayfish vulnerability to loss, yet species with small ranges have received little research attention. Orconectes saxatilis is a ra...

This paper reports the issues and results of AI Challenge: \Understanding Three Simultaneous Speeches". First, the issues of the Challenge are revisited. We emphasis the importance of information fusion of various attributes of speeches (sounds) in separating speeches from a mixture of sounds. This emphasis is supported by comparing two methods of speech separation; computational auditory scene...

A principal problem of auditory scene analysis is stream segregation: decomposing an input acoustic signal into signals of individual sound sources included in the input. While existing signal processing algorithms cannot properly solve this inverse problem, a multi-agent-based architecture has been considered to be a promising methodology in its modularity and scalability. However, most attemp...

This study contrasts different forms of familiarity with a talker’s voice, to better explore how these types of familiarity might influence a listener’s ability to understand that voice in the context of noise. Listeners were asked to shadow a target voice while a second voice spoke fluently in the background. Listeners differed in their familiarity with the target voice: one group was familiar...