Speech is typically perceived against a background of other sounds. Listeners are adept at extracting target sources from the acoustic mixture reaching the ears. The auditory scene analysis account holds that this feat is the result of a two stage process: In the first stage sound is decomposed into collections of fragments in several dimensions. Subsequent processes of perceptual organization ...

Research into the perception and cognition of music listening often contains implicit assumptions about the nature of the underlying mental representations, and about the relationship between "auditory processing" and "music perception". We attempt to highlight and problemitize some of these assumptions and to provide a more cognitively appropriate model for music perception and cognition, base...

The human auditory system uses a number of well-identified cues to segregate and separate individual sound sources in a complex acoustical environment. For example, researchers in auditory scene analysis have long identified cues such as common onset, correlated fluctuations in instantaneous amplitude and frequency, harmonicity, and common interaural time and amplitude differences as ways of id...

Auditory scene analysis is a demanding computational process that is performed automatically and efficiently by the healthy brain but vulnerable to the neurodegenerative pathology of Alzheimer's disease. Here we assessed the functional neuroanatomy of auditory scene analysis in Alzheimer's disease using the well-known 'cocktail party effect' as a model paradigm whereby stored templates for audi...

Title of dissertation: NEURAL BASIS AND COMPUTATIONAL STRATEGIES FOR AUDITORY PROCESSING Mounya Elhilali, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor Shihab A. Shamma Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Our senses are our window to the world, and hearing is the window through which we perceive the world of sound. While seemingly effortless, the process of hearin...

Recent psychophysical studies suggest that human listeners do not segregate concurrent sounds by grouping frequency regions that have a common interaural time difference (ITD). However, such an approach is adopted by most computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) systems that use binaural cues. Here, we propose a CASA system that separates a target speech signal from a noise interferer, but ...

A challenging problem for research in computational auditory scene analysis is the integration of evidence derived from multiple grouping principles. We describe a computational model which addresses this issue through the use of a `blackboard' architecture. The model integrates evidence from multiple grouping principles at several levels of abstraction, and manages competition between principl...

An algorithm is proposed which calculates a computationally efficient approximation of a certain physiologically-motivated representation for sound, called the summary autocorrelation function. This representation has been found very useful in several tasks, such as sound separation, multiple period estimation, and computational auditory scene analysis. However, it has been computationally too ...

We perceive the world as stable and composed of discrete objects even though auditory and visual inputs are often ambiguous owing to spatial and temporal occluders and changes in the conditions of observation. This raises important questions regarding where and how 'scene analysis' is performed in the brain. Recent advances from both auditory and visual research suggest that the brain does not ...