On the Emergence and Awareness of Auditory Objects 英文参考文献.docVIP

Primer On the Emergence and Awareness of Auditory Objects Shihab Shamma A nyone who has walked into a crowded reverberant nightclub, with a hubbub of multiple conversations amidst blaring music, will recall the initial impression high level of representation (e.g., different words that are semantically similar). Two new articles in PLoS Biology [6,7] explore and of the sound as loud and undifferentiated noise. In short order, however, different sound streams begin to emerge as one attends to individual speakers, listens to the melody from the band, or even hears one instrument in it. Humans perform this remarkable feat effortlessly. Our extraordinary abilities to extract signal from noise have evolved in natural environments that are often extremely auditorily cluttered. Many animals have developed abilities to navigate their complex auditory scenes in order to mate, locate prey, feed their young, and avoid predators. It is likely that these abilities are mediated by similar mechanisms that have evolved in many animals and include a mix of “bottom-up” automatic processes with complex “top-down” behaviors involving attention, expectation, learning, and memory (as illustrated schematically in Figure 1). However, little is known about the underlying computational details, or the manner in which these diverse processes interact to give rise to this auditory ability. And it is therefore no coincidence that we still lack engineering systems that can recognize speech robustly in realistic environments, or reliably transcribe polyphonic music. expand on these themes and lead the auditory research community into uncharted territory, presenting creative opinions, provocative psychoacoustic results, and exciting neuronal recordings. These studies will likely have significant impact on, and implications for, the theoretical and experimental research into the biological mechanisms underlying scene analysis and informational masking. The two papers complement each other well in