ABSTRACT
The auditory system tries to hear the input as a minimal set of ideal streams composed by these ideal relations. The auditory description of an acoustic environment is built up out of descriptions of separate streams and of relations between them. The stream segregation studies led upward to the idea that these effects were due to heuristic processes of scene analysis. The assignment process is most striking here because it takes properties that were presented at one spatial position and assigns them to a stream that is represented as having a different spatial position. The auditory description of an acoustic environment is built up out of descriptions of separate streams and of relations between them. The auditory description process accounts for the input in terms of the co-occurrence of a number of such ideal streams interacting in ideal ways. The properties of ideal streams can be used as heuristic guides for the interpretation of the acoustic input.
