ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an approach that may be helpful as a heuristic for drawing intermodal analogies. This approach is embodied in the theory of indispensable attributes. The chapter describes the research on pitch segregation—the segregation of one tone among other concurrent tones. The temporal relationship between the low and the high tones is all but lost, and an intermittent low tone is heard concurrently with an intermittent high tone. The high and the low tones have segregated into two streams, a phenomenon called stream segregation by Albert S. Bregman and fission by L. P. A. S. van Noorden. Segregation can occur if the information stored in echoic memory and the current input are related by a successive-difference cue. Generating the monaural phase segregation phenomenon is simple: Consider a set of harmonically related sinusoids starting all with a positive zero-crossing and having a common zero-crossing at the frequency of the fundamental.
