Abstract
An important property of sound is its variation as a function of time, which carries much relevant information about the origin of a given sound. Further, in analyzing the ?meaning? of a sound perceptually, the temporal variation is of tremendous importance. In spite of its perceptual importance, much is still unknown of how temporal information is analyzed and represented in the auditory system.
The PhD lecture concerns the topic of temporal processing in hearing and the topic is approached via four different listening experiments designed to probe several aspects of temporal processing. Specifically, the auditory tasks of the described experiments may be considered as falling into two categories: (1) Temporal integration when listeners have to judge the overall loudness of relatively long (compared to the temporal resolution of the auditory system) sounds fluctuating in level, and (2) temporal pattern recognition where listeners have to identify properties of the actual patterns of level changes. Typically temporal processing is modeled by some sort of temporal summation or integration device. The results of the present experiments are to a large extent incompatible with this modeling scheme: Effects such as attention seem to play an important role in loudness integration, and further, it will be demonstrated that the auditory system can rely on temporal cues at a much finer level of detail than predicted be existing models (temporal details in the time-range of 60 ?s can be discriminated, while models typically predict a limit around 1 ms).
The effects observed in the experiments presented in this PhD work are too diverse to be adequately described by a single stage responsible for temporal processing. Therefore, several stages are suggested and an attempt is made to identify properties of their critical operating range.
| Original language | English |
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| Place of Publication | Aalborg University |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |