Acoustics and psychoacoustics of sound scenes and events

Abstract

Auditory scenes are made of several different sounds overlapping in time and frequency, propagating through space, and resulting in complex arrays of acoustic information reaching the listeners' ears. Despite the complexity of the signal, human listeners segregate effortlessly these scenes into different meaningful sound events. This chapter provides an overview of the auditory mechanisms subserving this ability. First, we briefly introduce the major characteristics of sound production and propagation and basic notions of psychoacoustics. The next part describes one specific family of auditory scene analysis models (how listeners segregate the scene into auditory objects), based on multidimensional representations of the signal, temporal coherence analysis to form auditory objects, and the attentional processes that make the foreground pop out from the background. Then, the chapter reviews different approaches to study the perception and identification of sound events (how listeners make sense of the auditory objects): the identification of different properties of sound events (size, material, velocity, etc.), and a more general approach that investigates the acoustic and auditory features subserving sound recognition. Overall, this review of the acoustics and psychoacoustics of sound scenes and events provides a backdrop for the development of computational methods reported in the other chapters of this volume.