I recently stumbled across, the father of Audio Scene Analysis, and Audio Anecdotes contributor, Al Bregman’s McGill website and was excited to find in addition to the theory of Audio Scene Analysis, the remarkable audio demos that originally accompanied his classic book
Audio Scene Analysis is the study of how we humans can make sense of the cacophony of noise we are bombarded by and be able to identify, locate, and focus on individual elements: such as one conversation in a crowded restaurant, or one instrument in an ensemble, while not being confused or distracted by all the other sounds and noise sources.
Al’s research into the perception of sound included creating clever audio sequences whose timing or construction expose hearing in a similar way that optical illusions explore the nature of vision. Additionally they are fun, and can reveal principles that can be applied to, say, make sounds more or less distinct.
Al explores applications of ASA in two articles he created for Audio Anecdotes (after carefully considering the goals and intended audience for our books):
Controlling the Perceptual Organization of Sound: Guidelines Derived from Principles of Audio Scene Analysis (AAv1 pg 35)
Creating Mixtures: The Application of Auditory Scene Analysis to Audio Recording (AAv3 )
Al’s website also an amazing list of researchers with ongoing investigation of: ASA, Auditory Perception, Psychophysics, hearing, Auditory neuroscience, Biology of ASA, Computation of ASA, Music Perception and Cognition, Speech Perception, Auditory Environments and Architecture, and more topics.
It will take me some time to wade through all of this material; please leave comments on exciting discoveries.
