Auditory Perception: A New Analysis and Synthesis

Richard Warren of has had a long and productive career studying auditory perception. This book is an analysis and synthesis of his research, and other relevant studies. Warren believes that his current book is not just a revision of his previous book, Auditory Perception: A New Synthesis1xAuditory Perception: A New Synthesis. Warren, R. See all References, but a new book with some new views. However, the two books clearly have much in common.For most of the past 50 years, the study of auditory perception has been either a study of speech and music perception or a psychoacoustical study of the perceptual attributes of sound. Richard Warren is one of few people who has placed auditory phenomena in a general perceptual context. That is, to tie our perception of sound to the objects in the real world that generate those sounds. He has looked for general perceptual principles that apply to all sounds, not only the special sounds, such as speech and music. While he has studied the perceptual attributes of sound, such as loudness and pitch, in some detail he has not, like most psychoacousticians, sought to describe only how the auditory system processes sound in order to form these attributes. Rather, he has explained how these attributes allow us to determine the sound-producing sources. While his work has often been overlooked when research on hearing has been reviewed, it is now much more timely given the renewed interest in auditory perception that has been seen in recent books and reviews (for example, Bregman2xAuditory Scene Analysis. Bregman, A.S. See all References, Handel3xListening. Handel, S. See all References, and Yost and Sheft4xSee all References). In this sense Richard Warren was ahead of the times.The research discussed in this book is centered on four general topics that Warren has studied over the past 40 years: pitch and infrapitch, scales of auditory magnitude, acoustic sequences and perceptual restoration of missing sounds. In his study of infrapitch and pitch, and in his attempt to provide a synthesis of these topics, Warren and his colleagues have studied the perception of the temporal pattern, pitch and timbre of sequences of repeated noise samples. Earlier, Warren conducted several studies that tied judgements of loudness to judgements of distance, to form an ‘ecological’ basis for loudness. Many studies have been undertaken by Warren's group to investigate how sequences of sounds, those that are unfamiliar and those that are familiar, are perceived. Warren has shown significant differences in judgements of temporal order depending on one's familiarity with the sounds. If a short section of a sentence is deleted, it is usually easy to tell that a deletion occurred and where in the sentence it occurred. However, if the short section is replaced with a noise segment, the sentence often seems unchanged. This is an example of Warren's work on restoration of missing sounds and temporal induction. This work has also been studied as ‘pulsation threshold’, and it has some resemblance to the Gestalt principles of closure and completion. The audio CD provided with the book, which was produced and narrated by Warren's longtime associate, James Bashford, provides many auditory examples of these phenomena. It is highly recommended that the reader listen to these examples to gain an appreciation of why Warren believes these phenomena deserve serious attention for the understanding ofauditory perception.The rest of the book provides background material that is related to the physics of sound, auditory anatomy and physiology, spatial localization, psychoacoustics and speech production. While these sections provide some sort of introduction to hearing, the book cannot be recommended as an introductory text. The coverage of the basics of hearing is too selective (for example, little discussion of the role of envelope and amplitude modulation is provided), often outdated (for example, most of the references are pre-1990s) and incomplete (for example, the discussion of the crucial role of outer hair cells in neural transduction of sound). Warren has an interest in the history of auditory perception and one can sense this interest when reading the background material. Often, more attention is paid to the history of an effect than to the most-recent studies (for example, complex-pitch perception). For someone who does not know much about hearing, this other material is somewhat useful for obtaining some knowledge, especially from a historical perspective, that is relevant to understanding Warren's analysis and synthesis of auditory perception. However, Warren does not succeed in tying this other material to his main themes. That is, given that he has been selective in what he discusses in these background sections, it is not always clear what the relevant ties are to his views of auditory perception.Auditory Perception ends with a brief discussion of the relationships between hearing and perception in general, including a few general perceptual and modality-specific rules. While this book should not be used as a textbook on hearing or auditory perception, it should be read by any serious student of perception, especially if they want to learn how hearing might fit into a general view of perception. Some will disagree with Warren's explanations of the auditory phenomena he has studied, but most of the work conducted by Warren deserves serious attention if one wants to formulate a thorough view of auditory perception. And the best way to gain an appreciation of this work is to read this book.