Events, sequences, and patterns: Hirsh’s prescient proposals

Abstract

Over four decades ago, Ira Hirsh was one of the first to recognize the need for auditory research to expand beyond the study of single tones, noise burst, and clicks. He wrote, ‘‘We propose to examine auditory perception at a more complex level. The discrimination among and identification of single sounds, which we shall refer to as acoustic events, is undoubtedly an important part of the perceptual process, but perhaps more important are the rules by which we distinguish and identify sequences of acoustic events. Auditory psychophysics has been concerned with the acoustic characteristics of the sequence parts, the events; but we need to know more about the ways in which the parts combine to form patterns which, since they are generated in time, we may call sequences’’ [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 31 (1959)]. This must be one of the more prescient proposals of that era, followed as it was not only by Hirsh’s series of studies of temporal processing, but by a raft of other adventures into the world he forecast, including research on a great variety of auditory patterns and sequences. Theoretical interpretations of that work and of the general problem areas that Hirsh pioneered will be discussed.