Auditory perception of sources, events and sequences

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This research program will explore the auditory perception and cognition of sound sources, events and sequences, including everyday sounds and music. The primary focus is on the integration of multiple sources of information: within the auditory modality for multidimensional attributes such as timbre, or across auditory, visual and haptic modalities. Musical timbre, an inherently multidimensional auditory attribute, plays several roles in sound source identification and in musical organization. We will study the acoustic properties that make some timbres more salient than others, how we perceive streams of sounds coming from instruments with different timbres, and how salient ones seem easier to hear out. We will also study how the surrounding musical context affects timbre perception. Research on the dynamics of musical listening increasingly uses techniques measuring psychophysiological response during listening. However, little attention has been given to the methodological underpinnings of many of these measures. We will analyze psychophysiological data recorded while listeners hear various kinds of change in single or multiple auditory attributes in sound sequences in an attempt to gage how the magnitude of the reaction depends on accumulated change across several dimensions. We will focus in particular on differences between expected and unexpected changes in order to provide a solid base against which to interpret psychophysiological studies of musical emotions. Action and perception interact in event and source perception and input from other sensory systems affects auditory perception. We will study how people integrate auditory, haptic, proprioceptive and visual information while controlling a specific gesture. Mainstream theories of multisensory integration emphasize the role of discrimination abilities in determining what unimodal source of information will dominate in a multisensory task. We will study how people learn statistical dependencies between different sources of sensory information. Our work will advance theories of information integration and have an impact on several application domains such as virtual reality systems.