Consultation des notices

Sequences composed of alternating bursts of different levels with no silences separating them can give rise to a perception of a continuous sound upon which is superimposed an intermittent stream. These experiments soughtt to determine how the perceived loudness of the intermittent stream depends on the level difference between higher-level and lower-level bursts in the sequence in cases in which continuity is either heard or not heard. In the main experiment, listeners were asked to adjust the level of continuous or intermittent comparison sequences to match the loudness of components that appeared to be either continuous or intermittent in an alternating-level reference sequence, thus urging them to focus on the two-stream percept. Loudness matches of the continuous comparison stimulus were close to physical levels of the lower-level bursts, whereas matches of the intermittent comparison stimulus were well below the physical levels of higher-level bursts. These results are discussed in terms of Bregman's [1990, Auditory Scene Analysis, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA]