ABSTRACT
The remarkable ability of the auditory system to distinguish sounds from different sources in a complex acoustic environment (e.g., a single speaker at a noisy party) is described in Chapter 10. The auditory system requires mechanisms that can separate out the sound components that originate from different sound sources and group together the sound components that originate from the same sound source. We look at the principles that the auditory system uses to interpret the complex information arriving at our ears. Then we consider the mechanisms underlying both simultaneous grouping (organizing sounds that occur at the same time) and sequential grouping (organizing sound sequences). >
