Timbre Constancy

-the quality of the sound is constant

-you can hear the timbre of your friends voice in a quiet room an at a cocktail party

-like visual constancy, it can be explained in terms of a complicated analysis of the brain

Auditory Scene Analysis

-This is understood as the process by which the human auditory system organizes sound into perceptually meaningful elements

-In order to hear sounds, the basilar membrane in the inner ear vibrates and neurons respond to that.

-A spectrogram is an image-like picture of the sounds coming together.

Auditory Stream

-Our perceptual grouping of the parts of the neural spectrogram that go together

-A stream is a single happening that when combined leads to an auditory event

Belongingness

-We see it as being a property of something

-ex: a line is a part of something else

Exclusive Allocation

-a sensory element should not be used in more than one description at a time

-i.e. we see the vase, or the face, but not both at the same time

Old-Plus-New Heuristic

-Sound B is free from the influence of Sound A

Stream Segregation Is Stronger When:

-The frequency separation between high and low tones is greater

Stream Segregation is Higher At: -Higher speeds

Gestalt Grouping Explanation:

-Things must be grouped together to perceive them

-Separation in time and frequency -2 things: proximity and similarity

Gestalt Theories Argued That:

-there was a competition between the forces of attraction

-it is impossible to perceive sensory elements without forming an organized whole -this is all automatic

Korte’s Third Law PVision)

-as the speed increases, the distance between flashes must shrink if good motion is to be seen

Korte’s Auditory Third Law

-if you want to maintain the sense of melodic motion as the frequency separation between high and low tones increases, you must slow the sequence down

Gestalt Principle of Closure/Perceived Continuity

-the circle may not be complete but we see it as a complete circle perceptually

-completing forms with gaps in them

-the closure mechanism is a way of dealing with missing evidence

Masking PAuditory)

-This occurs when a loud sound covers up or drowns out a softer one

-Even if the softer sound is removed, it is still heard as continuing under the loud sound Pshows closure)

Sequential Integration PHorizontal grouping)

-when you put A and B together into a stream Pputting it into a sequence)

-forms a melodic component of music Pmelody)

Spectral Integration PVertical grouping)

-the fusing of B with C into a single sound Psimultaneous, all at once)

-acoustic inputs that occur at the same time Pchords and harmony)

Computer Modeling Approach

-the notion of a heuristic

-solves a problem to find a solution

Syntactic Theory

-how to describe the rules that allow the speaker to impose a meaning on the sentence by adding, subtracting or rearranging elements in the sentence

Noam Chomsky’s Deep Structure

-in order to understand the sentence, the listener parses the sentence and builds a deep structure for it

Physiological Explanation

-the streaming effect represents both the breakdown of a physiological mechanism and the accomplishment of scene analysis

Sound-emitting

-humans make use of this rather than sound-reflecting

Low-Frequency Sounds

-bend around obstructions

High Frequency Sounds

-bounce around obstructions

Echoes

-in audition, echoes are delayed copies of the sound and often mix with the original sound -in vision, echoes are useful in specifying the shapes of objects

Primitive Stream Segregation -unlearned constraints

Schema-Based Stream Segregation

-learned constraints

-a mental representation of some regularity in our experience

Principle of Psychophysical Complementarity

-states that the mental processes of animals have evolved to be complementary with the structure of the surrounding world

Demany’s Infant Sound Experiment

-The infants perceived the sounds as being the same, even when they were different.