"Auditory Scene Analysis addresses the problem of hearing in complex auditory environments. It uses a series of creative analogies to describe the process required of the human auditory system as it analyzes mixtures of sounds to recover descriptions of individual sounds. Unified and comprehensive, it establishes a theoretical framework that integrates Bregman's findings with an unusually wide range of previous research in psychoacoustics, speech perception, music theory and composition, and computer modeling. The core of the book explains how primitive auditory processes employ a set of principles, analogous to those employed in computer pattern recognition that use correlations in acoustic inputs, received simultaneously and successively, to conclude that they must have been caused by the same environmental event. Bregman shows how the resulting organization affects perceptions and demonstrates that the same principles apply in laboratory studies of simple signals, in music composition, and in speech perception. He examines schema-based scene analysis, relations between vision and audition, and problems with current theories concerning the duplex perception of speech. He concludes by summarizing what is known about auditory scene analysis and suggests directions for future study. Albert Bregman is Professor of Psychology at McGill University. A Bradford Book

This compact disk contains 41 audio illustrations of the principles underlying the human perceptual organization of sound that were first described in Albert Bregman's book, "Auditory Scene Analysis" (MIT Press 1990). The CD can be played on any home CD player; for the most part the audio demonstrations can be listened to over loudspeakers, but a few are in stereo and require headphones. While referring readers to the relevant pages in the book, the CD can be used on its own. Each demonstration is described in the companion 78-page booklet, along with a diagram, an explanation, technical details and suggested readings. There is also a 58-item bibliography. The CD can also provide a set of perceptual phenomena that any computational mode of auditory scene analysis should be able to explain. As such, it can serve as a test bed for theory.