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Hearing

Understanding how we hear cannot be reduced to a mere description of facts based on physics and on a description of the structures of the ear or brain involved in hearing. What we hear is full of shades and impressions. These shades come in particular from the way of organizing the auditory information that reaches the ear, this organization being based on certain principles. We also use cues to find out where sounds are coming from. Just as if all this was not mysterious enough, some sounds appear clearly identifiable as speech sounds, while other sounds clearly appear as part of a musical structure. The purpose of this chapter is to understand these sets of auditory phenomena.

3.1

Perceptual Organization

As we will see in the study of vision, major principles revealing how visual perception is organized have been uncovered almost a century ago. The development on the perceptual organization in audition came a little later. Albert Bregman has contributed greatly to the development of this facet of the hearing, particularly with the publication of his book Auditory Scene Analysis, which provides a solid synthesis of the principles underlying this organization (Bregman, 1990). A series of illusions or auditory effects show that the link between what is presented and what is heard is not always straightforward. The brain has to deal with the entire context in which the stimuli are arriving. In particular, the extent to which stimuli are similar and arrive more or less at the same time determines what is heard.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Grondin, Psychology of Perception, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31791-5_3

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3.1.1

3 Hearing

Streaming

The organization of auditory information is the perceptual integration and segregation of the auditory material of the environment in significant auditory representations (Snyder & Alain, 2007). When there are many sounds in the environment that arrive simultaneously or in rapid succession, it is necessary that elements be grouped, integrated, and merged into the same “sound object,” just like other components of the auditory environment that have to be segregated and assigned to different “objects.” Indeed, while the sound may sometimes refer to the physical stimulation in the environment or to the experience extracted from it by an observer, Bregman will use the term stream to describe the perceptual unit forming an object. The stream, or auditory line, is the psychological experience in audition that could be compared to the notion of object in vision. The auditory stream allows the grouping of related acoustical qualities; it is based on the relationships that one perceives between successive sounds. The concept of grouping is central to the idea covered by this notion of stream. A musical melody and the sounds of successive and regular footsteps are striking examples of impressions of streams. In the environment, there are many changes of sound intensities and frequencies and changes of source locations and several temporal irregulari