Recovering sound sources from embedded repetition.

ABSTRACT: Cocktail parties and other natural auditory environments present organisms with mixtures of sounds. Segregating individual sound sources is thought to require prior knowledge of source properties, yet these presumably cannot be learned unless the sources are segregated first. Here we show that the auditory system can bootstrap its way around this problem by identifying sound sources as repeating patterns embedded in the acoustic input. Due to the presence of competing sounds, source repetition is not explicit in the input to the ear, but it produces temporal regularities that listeners detect and use for segregation. We used a simple generative model to synthesize novel sounds with naturalistic properties. We found that such sounds could be segregated and identified if they occurred more t

SUBMITTER: McDermott JH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3024660 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature