Post by Audiophile Neuroscience on Aug 29, 2019 11:26:07 GMT 10
Interesting take. I need to think about this for a couple days. More later.
To me, ASA was a kind of breakthrough in understanding many issues that seem to bedevil audio perception - once I understood that ASA is fundamentally trying to explain the processing/analysis mechanism underlying our auditory perception some things became clear
- we basically are born with a organic learning mechanism (brain) which contacts the outside world through our senses
- all our senses do is send electrical nerve signals to the brain & it is these nerve signals that have to be made sense of with relation to the real world objects
- our development entails learning the relationship between these signals & the objects from which they originate
- this is a complex task which requires a lot of processing made even more by the fact that in the auditory field the signals are not sufficient for the processing to come up with one unique solution
- in other words, given a complex mix of pressure waves hitting the ear drums from many different sound objects happening at once (the usual situation encountered in the world), it is not often NOT possible to know exactly how many sound producing objects there are, what individual signals belong to what object, where the objects are in space, etc
- if just analysing these signals alone, we would often find that there is just not enough information to solve the problem of mapping the auditory scene - hence we use all sorts of other techniques as part of this analysis - cross correlation with visual information, knowledge of how sound objects behave in the real world, predictions about (ASA using a best guess of the auditory scene but we
So, to my way of thinking, ASA is an investigation into the mechanisms that we use to analyse & resolve the electrical nerve impulse signals that arrive from our hearing structures.
Hi John
I essentially agree with you but don't want to overplay the role of ASA. Not everyone agrees with all aspects of the model and as such it is theory or approach rather than established neuroscience. As a descriptive label for all the mechanisms you describe I have no problem except I don't want to necessarily endorse all the explanations typically offered. Again, I have no doubt that the brain uses perceptual cues to make sense of the jumbled mess of incoming signals, but research as to the mechanisms continue.
"Despite advances in understanding ASA, it still proves to be a major challenge for auditory research, especially in verifying whether experimental findings are transferable to more realistic auditory scenes."Probing auditory scene analysis" Front Neurosci. 2014; 8: 293. Published online 2014 Sep 12. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2014.00293
I do agree that whatever you call it there is an innate component to the way we decompose the incoming auditory signals. That said, like all perception it is malleable, prone to further learning and conditioning IOW an acquired skill. Nature and nurture if you will. The "taste" ROWUK comes into it only so far as ones's preferences to develop those skills in certain areas
Cheers
David
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