Ear and Brain Mechanisms for Parsing the Auditory Scene

Abstract

The cocktail party is a popular metaphor for the complex auditory scene that is everyday life. In busy offices, crowded restaurants, and noisy streets, a listener is challenged to hear out signals of interest—most often speech from a particular talker—amid a cacophony of competing talkers, broadband machine noise, room reflections, and so forth. This chapter defines the problems that the auditory system must solve and introduces the ensuing chapters, which explore the relevant perception and physiology at all levels: in normal mature hearing, in early development, in aging, and in pathology.