ABSTRACT
The notions of image and imagery are intricate regarding the many meanings which have been assigned to them in disciplines such as philosophy and psychology (cf. Schneider & Godøy this volume). Also, there are writings on literature and the arts in general which address ‘imagery’ in many ways (e.g., Leppert, 1996). In a more restricted perspective developed in areas of cognitive psychology, imagery is still defined quite loosely as the experience of ‘seeing with the mind’s eye’ or ‘hearing with the mind’s eye’ (cf. Kosslyn, 1990, p. 177). It is believed, however, that the principal elusiveness of imagery can be overcome by more objective methods, most of all by computational approaches. Such have been taken, in among other fields, psychoacoustics and hearing research where various models have been developed which produce, at one stage of processing signals such as speech or music, a plot of features extracted from the signal which is labelled auditory image (see, e.g., Patterson et al., 1992, 1995). Regarding the peripheral transduction process in hearing, acoustical stimuli which cause a certain activity pattern in the auditory nerve are thereby transformed into auditory images which maintain basic signal features such as, for example, periodicity. This of course has implications for the perception of pitch. There are a number of hypotheses how such images could finally be ‘represented’ at the level of the auditory midbrain as well as the cortices by means of tonotopically organized maps or other spatiotemporal mechanisms.
