ABSTRACT
This last part of the text explores some phenomena of hearing that arise only with sounds more complex than pure tones. A fundamental issue is the degree to which facts that we know about the physical stimuli or about the neural coding of signals account for behavioral findings. One aspect of this is the degree to which the hearing system acts like a spectrum analyzer and thereby reduces the phenomena in question to the study of pure tones. The answer is “to some degree,” but we encounter a number of important auditory phenomena having no explanation in terms of the physics of the stimuli or of the peripheral physiology. Presumably they involve higher centers of the brain engaged in functions not yet understood.
