Auditory Scene Analysis: Future Directions For Musicological Research

Abstract

Abstract This session presented aspects of one of the recent developments in psychoacoustics which promise exciting new directions for musicological research. The concept of auditory scene analysis (ASA) was introduced in the 1980s by Albert S. Bregman (see especially his Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound, Cambridge, MA, 1990). The theory describes the ability of the human auditory system to organize the acoustic chaos created by multiple sound sources into separate though interacting perceptual ‘streams’ or ‘objects’. This process involves a two-tiered structure of stream segregation (primitive, i.e. innate, and schema-based, i.e. learnt), and a range of acoustic ‘cues’ for integrating simultaneous and sequential components of acoustic patterns (such as frequency proximity, temporal proximity, spatial location, timbre, repetitions, interaction with vision, etc.). The concept of the auditory scene encompasses all possible ‘soundscapes’, including environmental noise, speech, and music.