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The Mind sees and the Mind hears. The Rest is Blind and Deaf Epicharmus 45O B.C.E. [cited in Coren & Ward (1989)]

Preface:

Auditory perception reveals a paradox similar to that encountered in all realms of perception: nothing seems more simple than to perceive the sound environment around us, and yet it is a phenomenon that appears to rebel against scientific analysis. What difficulty exists, for example, in recognizing one's name in a sentence pronounced by another person, in differentiating the noise of a car from that of an airplane, in perceiving the captivating rock rhythms of Bill Haley, in recognizing the voice of one's own child or the steps of a familiar person? All that seems to be needed is simply to `open one's ears'.

Imagine for just an instant, however, the array of information and the set of procedures with which it would be necessary to endow a computer in order for it to be able to distinguish a violin from a flute in a musical polyphony, to extract an alarm signal from the sonorous background within which it is embedded, to grasp the connection between a theme and a musical variation, to analyze by simply listening to the noise of a car a problem with the motor, to detect an inhabitual noise in the beating of a patient's heart, and so on. In spite of the high level of technological sophistication available today, it is quite likely that these kinds of problems could only be resolved after many years of research in artificial intelligence and signal processing, since the amount of necessary information is so great and the ways it must be combined are so complex.

This difficulty in analyzing the process of listening underscores the great richness of information present in the world of sound around us. The main objective of this book is to evaluate the current state of what we know about cognitive aspects of human audition. The book is primarily oriented toward students in the cognitive sciences and scientists specializing in fields other than auditory psychology. Most of the material presented presumes at least an elementary knoweldge of acoustic terminology and of the concepts and methods of experimental psychology. But before we move on to describe the contents of the volume, let us consider what there is of a cognitive nature in audition.

What is cognitive in audition?

Etymologically speaking, the term `cognition' refers to the notion of knowledge. It has been used in a more specific sense to designate the conditions that allow humans to develop knowledge of the world. It almost goes without saying that no knowledge can be acquired in the absence of perceiving: in other words, no theory of knowledge is complete without a theory of its acquisition, and thus of perception. To emphasize the cognitive aspects of audition is thus primarily to remind us that auditory information participates in a fundamental way in the development of knowledge.

Of course the processes that are part and parcel of the perception of acoustic information can seem quite different from those that intervene in more abstract intellectual activities (thinking, logic, reasoning, decision making, imagination, etc.). Two remarks need to be made on this point, however. First of all, the originality of the cognitive project is the desire to present an integrated picture of the ensemble of intellectual processes, in making evident the continuity that exists between more elementary aspects of these activities (sensory information processing) and more abstract aspects (symbolic information processing). The cognitive project therefore goes beyond the traditional division into independent intellectual functions: perception, memory, learning, language, intellection, etc. To emphasize the cognitive character of human audition is also to manifest the will to situate the processes of auditory perception within this continuity.

The second remark more directly concerns the mental processes implied in auditory perception. The emphasis placed on the term `cognitive' in this volume highlights the fact that beyond the elementary phases of processing, higher-level processes that bring into play mental representations, decision making, inference, and interpretations by the perceptual system are necessary to elaborate a coherent representation of the sound world.

The postulate of a cognitive approach to perception is that the sensory information must be interpreted in order to give rise to a coherent perception. Interpretation is necessary since the information contained in the stimuli that reach the sensory organs is not always sufficient to form a coherent image of the surrounding sound environment. In these cases, the perceptual system must represent and then compare auditory information that is not directly present at the sensory level. One of the main reasons for this is that sound events are events that succeed one another in time: to perceive their structure requires the elaboration of a mental representation in order to be able subsequently to establish relations among events that are separated from one another by several minutes or even hours. Music offers a typical example here: how can we perceive the unity of a sound structure that develops over a very long time-span (one and a half hours in the case of Beethoven's 9th Symphony) without elaborating representations of the sub-structures (thematic ones, for example) that are developed in the work?

When the sensory data that are immediately available are found to be insufficient, the perceptual system analyzes the situation by taking into consideration knowledge that it has acquired of the surrounding sound world. Information from the environment does not, with the exception of newborns, stimulate a completely naïve organism. Acquired knowledge interacts with the current sensory data to interpret the auditory stimulation. Imagine for an instant that we are being guided through an Amazonian rain forest: we would hear exactly the same noise as the native of the region that accompanies us but we would be incapable, due to a lack of knowledge of the environment, not only to extract from the sound background events corresponding to the cries of iguanas and Macaques, the songs of Wistiti monkeys, or the rustling of the leaves of tropical trees, but we would also be unable to assign meanings to the entire sound structure that may in the long run be important for survival. In the same way, the Golden Ears of the French Navy have been trained in sonar detection to listen to what most of us would hear as a noisy underwater sound field and to perceptually segregate and identify a multitude of underwater sources such as clicking shrimp, whales, porpoises, schools of fish, and ocean-going vessels. They even succeed in classifying such vessels as commercial or military, as surface or submarine, as diesel or nuclear, as Russian, American, or French. In particularly dramatic cases, an inability to perceptually segregate sound sources and recognize their nature could fail to lead a listener to deduce from these signals the presence of imminent danger: the appearance of a jaguar, or a clandestin submarine, for example.

In the case of sound structures like music, whose organization is highly determined by cultural rules, a simple observation of the information recorded at the level of the sensory organs does not suffice to explain the difference in our perception of a Mozart quartet or one by Beethoven. In many other situations, the information available at the level of the sense organs may be too ambiguous to give rise to a unique perception of the current situation. Imagine, for instance, that we are in an old country house at night: are the noises we perceive the result of the steps of an unwanted intruder seeking to enter the house, or of the creeking of old woodwork strained by the wind? The identification of the sources of sound can be different according to the kinds of information to which we pay most attention: regularities in the noise or the timbral qualities of the materials being set into vibration. Faced with ambiguous stimuli of this kind, the perceptal system normally makes a subconscious decision in order to organize the sound figure. The knowledge possessed by the listener certainly plays an important role at this level: in the preceding example, a child, an adult or the owner of the house would arrive at different interpretations of the same situation since they do not have the same auditory knowledge base.

Auditory illusions are another situation that emphasizes the interpretive work performed by the perceptual system: nevertheless, in this case, the inference realized on the basis of the available information is incorrect and results in the perception of an unreal sound object. Composers have known for centuries how to exploit these perceptual characteristics in order to create seductive sound figures. Bach's sonatas and partitas for violin are a remarkable example of auditory illusion: the listener perceives quite clearly the presence of two violins playing in different pitch registers although there is actually only one violinist rapidly alternating between registers. Or, by appropriately orchestrating several instruments playing the same melody in parallel at different pitches, Ravel in his piece Bolero succeeds in tricking the ear into hearing not the original set of familiar instruments, but a single, new `virtual' sound source with a marvelous, previously unheard timbral quality.

The current state of auditory cognition research

• the perception of stimulus qualities or attributes and patterns (all senses),
• perceptual organization processes (usually confined to vision),
• perceptual categorization and perceptual constancy (confined to vision and speech),
• recognition and identification of objects, events, and patterns (confined to vision and speech),
• memory processes (vision and speech with occasional reference to audition),
• attentional processes (primarily visual although dichotic listening is often well-represented),
• development, learning, and skill acquisition (rarely touching upon audition),
• grammars of large-scale temporal structures (exclusively linguistic, almost never referring to music),
• problem solving and reasoning (never related to auditory problem solving as might be involved in musical composition, for example).

It is particularly important to note that the realm where much truly auditory (nonverbal) cognitive research has taken place is music psychology. In the last 20 to 30 years this area has seen a substantial expansion in the problems posed and the methodologies developed for exploring the musical mind. Most human listeners possess and deploy a high level of perceptual and cognitive sophistication for understanding, appreciating, and participating in musical activity. The primary interest of this area for the cognitive sciences is that musical systems are ubiquitous in the cultures of the world, they have attained a degree of structural (i.e. grammatical) complexity that rivals that of language, and they can be learned without explicit training at a very early age as is also the case with language. The importance of music psychology for auditory cognition in general is evidenced by the strong place it occupies in most of the chapters of this volume.

One of the areas that has not received much attention, with the exception of some studies in young children, is the understanding of the role of auditory cognitive processes and their integration with those of other sensory and more general cognitive systems in everyday activity, e.g. using acoustic cues for navigating safely through a city environment, for manipulating and monitoring the function of sophisticated machinery, or for evaluating the identity and significance of events in the environment that are not within one's current field of vision. Research programs addressing some of these issues are sure to demonstrate a more important role for audition in everyday activity than has been granted to this sensory system by our more visually and linguistically oriented colleagues.

Organization of the book

There are many ways to subdivide a field of research. The division adopted in this book comprises the following (overlapping) domains of auditory research--perceptual organization (Bregman), global pattern perception (Warren), attentional processes (Jones & Yee), memory processes (Crowder), recognition (McAdams), neuropsychology (Peretz), music perception (Bigand), and developmental psychology (Trehub & Trainor). The main types of auditory processing dealt with in this book, and their interactions, are schematically summarized in Figure 1. Sound vibrations enter the inner ears where they are analyzed and transduced into nerve impulses that are sent by way of the auditory nerve to the brain. (The process of transduction of vibrations into neural impulses is only briefly discussed in the chapter by McAdams.)

[Figure 1]

Auditory grouping processes effect the fusion and segregation of concurrent sound elements into auditory events, as well as the temporal integration and segregation of successive sound events into auditory streams. These processes are brought into play daily in many different ways. For example, sitting in front of the television you may suddenly hear the honking horn of a car in the street outside the window. Without the slightest hesitation this newly arrived noise will be heard as separate from and superimposed upon that of the television and not as forming a single sound object with whatever happens to be sounding on the television at the moment. Such auditory grouping processes are the main focus of Bregman's chapter, but are also discussed in the chapters by Warren, Jones & Yee, Bigand, and Trehub & Trainor.

According to the theory of auditory scene analysis, auditory grouping generally precedes the extraction or computation of perceptual properties or attributes; that is, attributes are the derived perceptual properties of the elements that have been grouped together. In Rimsky-Korsakov's The Flight of the Bumblebee, for example, the notes follow in extremely rapid succession in such a way as to form a single sound stream, but come too fast to be heard separately. What imposes itself on a listener's perception is the overall form of the melodic line, anchored in time by the contour peaks and valleys as well as the accented notes played by the trumpet player. The global perception of sequential sound patterns and their temporal organization are discussed in the chapters by Warren and Jones & Yee.

Once the perceptual qualities are represented in the auditory system, they can be interpreted with respect to evoked abstract knowledge structures. The result is the recognition and identification of, as well as the assignment of meaning or significance to events and sequences of events with respect to the local stimulus context and the previous experience of the listener. If you are cooking in the kitchen and suddenly hear a loud `kablam' in the dining room, auditory analysis of the heard noises allows you to identify a plate breaking on the floor, forks and knives tumbling around, the muffled sound of the dish of vegetables crashing, and a cat's surprised meow. From this analysis you succeed in attaching meaning to the whole scene, the cat was playing with the corner of the table cloth and pulled everything with it off the table onto the floor. The psychological and neuropsychological processes underlying such auditory recognition of sound sources, sound events, and sound sequences are reviewed in the chapters by Crowder, McAdams, and Peretz. A more general review of specifically auditory aspects implicated in memory processes is developed by Crowder. In adults, the perception of musical relations is in part conditioned by abstract knowledge structures that have been acquired in listening to the music of a given culture. The form of these knowledge structures for Western tonal/metric music is delineated in the chapter by Bigand. In addition, the existence of precocious abilities that underly their development in children is reviewed by Trehub & Trainor, while the impairment of access to such structures in brain-damaged patients is discussed by Peretz.

The perceived relations among sound events can evoke a whole interpretive framework that affects the perception of subsequent events. This framework strongly influences the establishment of larger-scale structural relations (of a hierarchical or associative nature). The processes that are responsible for this level of perception and comprehension are labeled event structure processing in Figure 1. Seated in a concert hall you await the arrival of the conductor: the musicians are warming up producing a great sound mass. Listening attentively, you don't hear any relation between what each one is playing. You decide therefore that each player is individually rehearsing different parts of the score. Then the concert starts. This time the events seem to follow one another with ease and you clearly perceive that the music progresses and develops through time. The exposition of the themes finishes and you then hear chords that are quite different from those in the preceding section. These changes in key announce the section in which the themes are developed. To grasp this progession supposes that each of the new sound events can be connected to the preceding events. In cases where the incoming sound material is completely unknown to the listener, or does not correspond to known systems of structural relations (as would be found in the music of a given culture, for example), more primitive structuring procedures, such as segmentation into groups of events, may still operate directly on the relations among perceived surface attributes.

The end result of event structure processing is the gradual elaboration of a mental representation of the structure of the sound environment currently being experienced by the listener.Studying the elaboration of a mental representation is important for cognitive psychology, since it is quite crucial for any sensory system whose input is entirely transitory, i.e. there are no persisting objects in audition, and information about acoustic events must be accumulated through time, attended to dynamically, and processed with respect to previous experience while new information is being received. You may be following the various paths of musical development in a symphony, but you have established a mental representation of what happened at the beginning, which allows you to realize that at this moment the music is progressively moving toward the reexposition of the principal theme, and you understand that the movement is about to come to a close. The chapter by Bigand reviews the processes implicated in event structure processing and the building up of a mental representation of the structure of the sound environment. These processes are shown to influence the degree to which listeners are capable of establishing larger-scale relations and thus to appreciate musical form and the development of musical ideas.

One of the important implications of event structure perception is that these structures serve as a framework having implications for the structure of acoustic information that has not yet arrived. By way of the interpretive framework evoked from abstract knowledge structures, anticipations and expectations may be set up that orient the listener's attention to forthcoming events of a particular kind or at particular times.These attentional processes may also be simply affected by perceived regularities in the stimulus structure. It is possible that attending itself may influence the activity of lower-level organizational processes (and even the process of sensory transduction). This area of attending to auditory events and its implication for perception and action are developed in the chapter by Jones & Yee. Acknowledgements

The Tutorial Workshop that resulted in the collective writing of this book was the fourth in a series organized by the Hearing Group of the French Acoustical Society (S.F.A.). The first three Workshops covered cochlear physiology (Aran, Dancer, Dolmazon, Pujol & Tran Ba Huy 1988), psychoacoustics and auditory perception (Botte, Canévet, Demany & Sorin 1989), and the central auditory nervous system (Roman, in press). The organization of the workshop and the preparation of the book were made possible by generous financial or infrastructural support from the following organizations:

• the Hearing Group of the S.F.A.,
• the program `Sciences de la Cognition' of the French Ministries of Research and Technology and of National Education,
• the Direction de Recherches, Etudes et Techniques of the French Ministry of Defense, and
• the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).

The chapters of this book were submitted to ad hoc peer review, each being reviewed by from two to four referees in addition to the reviews made by the volume editors. Each co-editor ensured the review process for the other. We would like first of all to thank the authors for cooperating with us in this rather arduous task. Secondly we would like to thank the reviewers who include Alain Lieury, Brian Moore, Bruno Repp, Charles Watson, Christopher Darwin, Earl Schubert, Eric Clarke, Francis Eustache, Jay Dowling, Jean-François Camus, Jose Morais, Josiane Bertoncini, Karen Yankelovich, Ken Robinson, Rachel Clifton, Robert Zatorre, Stanislas Dehaene, and Stephen Handel. Three reviewers chose not to have their names listed. We would also like to thank Cécile Marin for preparing the subject and name indexes and Carolyn Drake and the authors for their helpful comments on the glossary.

This book is being published in both English and French. The French edition will appear as Les aspects cognitifs de l'audition humaine, published by Presses Universitaires de France.

S.M. & E.B.

Paris, 8 February 1992

References

Aran, J.-M., Dancer, A., Dolmazon, J.-M., Pujol, R. & Tran Ba Huy, P. (1988). Physiologie de la cochlée. Editions INSERM/E.M.I., Paris.

Botte, M.-C., Canévet, G., Demany, L. & Sorin, C. (1989). Psychoacoustique et perception auditive. Editions INSERM/E.M.I./S.F.A., Paris.

Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory scene analysis: The perceptual organization of sound. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Coren, S. & Ward, L. M. (1989). Sensation and perception, 3rd ed. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, San Diego.

Dooling, R. J. & Hulse, S. H. (1989). The comparative psychology of audition: Perceiving complex sounds. L. Erlbaum Assoc., Hillsdale, N.J.

Dowling, W. J. & Harwood, D. L. (1986). Music cognition. Academic Press, Orlando, Florida.

Handel, S. (1989). Listening: An introduction to the perception of auditory events. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Humphreys, G. W. & Bruce, V. (1989). Visual cognition: Computational, experimental, and neuropsychological perspectives. L. Erlbaum Assoc., Hillsdale, N.J.

Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco.

Moore, B. C. J. (1982). Introduction to the psychology of hearing, 3d. ed. Academic Press, London.

Pinker, S. (ed.) (1984). Visual cognition. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. [reprinted from Cognition, vol. 18].

Roman, R. (in press). Le système auditif central: Anatomie et physiologie. Editions INSERM/E.M.I., Paris.

Sloboda, J. A. (1985). The musical mind: The cognitive psychology of music. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Warren, R. M. (1982). Auditory perception: A new synthesis. Pergamon Press, New York.

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