Speech segregation, or the cocktail party problem, has proven to be extremely challenging. This presentation describes a computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) approach to the cocktail party problem. This approach performs auditory segmentation and grouping in a two-dimensional time-frequency representation that encodes proximity in frequency and time, periodicity, amplitude modulation, a...

In his most recent contribution to an important and well-framed series of papers on auditory grouping and the perception of polyphonic music, David Huron seeks further evidence for his working hypothesis that J.S. Bach controls the employment of perfect consonances by desynchronizing their onsets, thereby inhibiting the perceptual fusion of polyphonic voices. However the more novel contribution...

Two pairs of experiments studied the effects of attention and of unilateral neglect on auditory streaming. The first pair showed that the build-up of auditory streaming in normal subjects is greatly reduced or absent when they attend to a competing task in the contralateral ear. It was concluded that the effective build-up of streaming depends on attention. The second pair showed that patients ...

Neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) of cats show strong stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA). In probabilistic settings, in which one stimulus is common and another is rare, responses to common sounds adapt more strongly than responses to rare sounds. This SSA could be a correlate of auditory sensory memory at the level of single A1 neurons. Here we studied adaptation in A1 neurons, using thr...

In listening to multi-part music, auditory streams can be attended to either selectively or globally. More specifically, musicians rely on prioritized integrative attention which incorporates both stream segregation and integration to assess the relationship between concurrent parts. In this fMRI study, we used a piano duet to investigate which factors of a leader-follower relationship between ...

OBJECTIVE To use functional magnetic resonance imaging to map the auditory cortical fields that are activated, or nonreactive, to sounds in patient M.L., who has auditory agnosia caused by trauma to the inferior colliculi. BACKGROUND The patient cannot recognize speech or environmental sounds. Her discrimination is greatly facilitated by context and visibility of the speaker's facial movement...

In contrast to the complex acoustic environments we encounter everyday, most studies of auditory segregation have used relatively simple signals. Here, we synthesized a new stimulus to examine the detection of coherent patterns ('figures') from overlapping 'background' signals. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that human listeners are remarkably sensitive to the emergence of such figu...

In this paper we describe work which characterises the effect of spatial factors on the segregation of concurrent sound sources. The results inform the operational requirements of virtual auditory displays required to render multiple, concurrent sound sources in terms of (i) minimum spacing between sources and (ii) identification of the principal acoustic directional cues exploited by the audit...