ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the experimental work over a number of years on human perception of complex sounds and the role of meaningfulness and familiarity in signal identification. It focuses on the role of selective attention in the perception of competing messages. In one of the first uses of factor-analysis techniques to analyze auditory capabilities, J. E. Karlin identified loudness discrimination, pitch-quality discrimination, memory span, and syntheses analysis as dimensions. To get some information on the relative value of harmonic structure vs. formant structure, some new sounds were synthesized. The advent of multidimensional scaling techniques for the types of data is most advantageous in the ability to analyze individual differences. The results of James H. Howard and S. R. Silverman that musical listeners tend to use either wave form or frequency (pitch) in contrast to nonmusical listeners who tend to use both is useful information.
