ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the limiting factors for discrimination of complex sounds are often central, whereas those that limit hearing of tones, noise bursts, or clicks tend to be peripheral. It focuses on sounds whose components vary in frequency, over time, and on the resulting interactions among the components. By complex stimuli people merely mean sounds whose spectral and temporal complexity is closer to that of human speech than are the sounds used in the majority of past psychoacoustic experiments. The results of the experiments also underscore the need for better understanding of the role of stimulus uncertainty in auditory detection and of the conditions under which people learn the properties of specific complex sounds. Thus, the stimulus uncertainty in the experiment compared to that in most psychoacoustic experiments was quite high. The perception of word-length complex tonal sequences, or patterns, is thus severely limited by factors beyond those revealed in experiments with single tones.
