What is auditory scene analysis?
Auditory scene analysis is a phenomenon where we separate out components of sound and group together the components from the same sound source. It can be thought of in terms of simultaneous grouping and sequential grouping.
Simultaneous grouping: Assigning frequencies to specified sound sources while they are occurring at the same time. Think about listening to an orchestra, and notice how you can pick out which instrument is the violin. Its components consist of temporal cues and harmonicity. These terms are defined below:
Sequential grouping: Being able to hear an ongoing sound from a single source. Think of a person's voice being the single source, and their utterance of a sentence being the ongoing sound. Its components consist of periodicity, spectral balance, level, spatial cues, good continuation, and perceptual restoration. These terms are defined below:
Does the loss of OHCs affect the components of auditory scene analysis?
Simultaneous Grouping
Sequential Grouping
Auditory scene analysis is a phenomenon where we separate out components of sound and group together the components from the same sound source. It can be thought of in terms of simultaneous grouping and sequential grouping.
Simultaneous grouping: Assigning frequencies to specified sound sources while they are occurring at the same time. Think about listening to an orchestra, and notice how you can pick out which instrument is the violin. Its components consist of temporal cues and harmonicity. These terms are defined below:
- Temporal cues: Separating frequencies based off of there onset and offset timing. For example, when you have to talk, the onset is opening your mouth and releasing sound and the offset is ending your sentence by closing your mouth.
- Harmonicity: When the harmonic components of many sound sources are grouped together nicely.
Sequential grouping: Being able to hear an ongoing sound from a single source. Think of a person's voice being the single source, and their utterance of a sentence being the ongoing sound. Its components consist of periodicity, spectral balance, level, spatial cues, good continuation, and perceptual restoration. These terms are defined below:
- Periodicity: Looking at what happens between intervals over a period of time.
- Spectral Balance: The ability to balance the distribution of various frequencies (low and high) from multiple sources.
- Level: How we perceive the volume of a sound. This is also known as intensity.
- Spatial Cues: Where we hear sounds coming from.
- Good Continuation: The smoothness of a sound throughout its duration.
- Perceptual Restoration: The ability to restore any missing information during speech
Does the loss of OHCs affect the components of auditory scene analysis?
Simultaneous Grouping
- Temporal Cues: would not affect temporal cues because the temporal code is primarily used in hearing for those with OHC loss
- Harmonicity: would be affected
Sequential Grouping
- Periodicity: still be able to follow periodicity but not as well
- Spectral Balance: would be affected because spectral balance depends on good frequency selectivity
- Level: would be affected because of no active mechanism; low level sounds would be difficult to hear
- Spatial Cues: would be minimally affected due to loss of frequency selectivity
- Good Continuation: would not be very affected; smoothness of sound will remain because of temporal code
- Perceptual Restoration: would possibly be affected, depending on the duration and volume of the noise