The preceding three chapters have been concerned with the issues arising as a result of the inconvenient fact that our ears are rarely presented with the sound of a single speaker in isolation, but more often with a combination of several speech and nonspeech sounds which may also have been further altered by the acoustic environment. Faced with such a mixture, the listener evidently needs to c...

Studies of auditory scene analysis have traditionally relied on paradigms using artificial sounds—and conventional behavioral techniques—to elucidate how we perceptually segregate auditory objects or streams from each other. In the past few decades, however, there has been growing interest in uncovering the neural underpinnings of auditory segregation using human and animal neuroscience techniq...

For monaural source separation two main approaches have thus far been adopted. One approach involves applying non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to an observed magnitude spectrogram, interpreted as a non-negative matrix. The other approach is based on the concept of computational auditory scene analysis (CASA). A CASAbased approach called the “harmonic-temporal clustering (HTC)” aims to cl...

We present a computational auditory scene analysis system for separating and recognizing target speech in the presence of competing speech or noise. We estimate, in two stages, the ideal binary time-frequency (T-F) mask which retains the mixture in a local TF unit if and only if the target is stronger than the interference within the unit. In the first stage, we use harmonicity to segregate the...

This section describes the research efforts and progress made for the implementation and performance of the quantum mechanical reactive scattering application (3D-REACT) across CASA heterogeneous computer environments with nodes that can reside at geographically different locations. This is a scientifically and technically important application. The formalism uses a symmetrized hyperspherical c...

Auditory scene analysis (ASA) refers to the process (es) of parsing the complex acoustic input into auditory perceptual objects representing either physical sources or temporal sound patterns, such as melodies, which contributed to the sound waves reaching the ears. A number of new computational models accounting for some of the perceptual phenomena of ASA have been published recently. Here we ...

A neural model is described which uses oscillatory correlation to segregate speech from interfering sound sources. The core of the model is a two-layer neural oscillator network. A sound stream is represented by a synchronized population of oscillators, and different streams are represented by desynchronized oscillator populations. The model has been evaluated using a corpus of speech mixed wit...

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 ...