
Albert BregmanMcGill University | McGill · Department of Psychology
Albert Bregman
PhD
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (95)
This paper is about two topics: a) the role of subjectivity in psychological research; and, b) my research on the perceptual organization of sound, in which subjectivity has played an important role. Audio demonstrations that appeal to the subjective experience of the reader are presented in lieu of objective research data to support the claims mad...
Adult listeners rated the difficulty of hearing a single coherent stream in a sequence of high (H) and low (L) tones that
alternated in a repetitive galloping pattern (HLH-HLH-HLH...). They could hear the gallop when the sequence was perceived
as a single stream, but when it segregated into two substreams, they heard H-H-... in one stream and L—L—....
The rhythm created by spacing a series of brief tones in a regular pattern can be disguised by interleaving identical distractors at irregular intervals. The disguised rhythm can be unmasked if the distractors are allocated to a separate stream from the rhythm by integration with temporally overlapping captors. Listeners identified which of 2 rhyth...
The effects of subunit formation on adult listeners' ability to notice changes in a continuous spectral gradient of sound were studied. Results of this experiment support the idea that the auditory system processes information differently within a unit, and that this processing does not occur unless the perceptual system detects unit boundaries. In...
The early research on auditory scene analysis (ASA) - the subject of my talk at the corresponding IEEE workshop in 1995 - has been followed by many exciting studies that have opened up new directions of research. A number of them will be discussed under the following headings: (1) What is the role of attention in ASA? (2) What have we learned by us...
Salience shapes the involuntary perception of a sound scene into foreground and background. Auditory interfaces, such as those used in continuous process monitoring, rely on the prominence of those sounds that are perceived as foreground. We propose to distinguish between the salience of sound events and that of streams, and introduce a paradigm to...
Research on auditory scene analysis (ASA) began with some simple laboratory phenomena such as streaming and illusory continuity. Subsequently, research has gone in three directions, downwards toward underlying mechanisms (by neurophysiologists), upwards toward system organization (by computer scientists), and sideways toward other species (by neuro...
Perceptual saliency is a precursor to bottom-up attention modeling. While visual saliency models are approaching maturity, auditory models remain in their infancy. This is mainly due to the lack of robust methods to gather basic data, and oversimplifications such as an assumption of monaural signals. Here we present the rationale and initial result...
In three experiments, we addressed the issue of attention effects on unattended sound processing when one auditory stream is selected from three potential streams, creating a simple model of the cocktail party situation. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to determine the way in which unattended, task-irrelevant sounds were stored in...
The rhythm created by spacing a series of brief tones in a regular pattern can be disguised by interleaving identical distractors at irregular intervals. The disguised rhythm can be unmasked if the distractors are allocated to a separate stream from the rhythm by integration with temporally overlapping captors. Listeners identified which of 2 rhyth...
Issues concerning auditory scene analysis (ASA) raised by the previous speakers will be discussed: (1) Disorders of ASA in humans can tell us about the weighting of cues in ASA. (2) The apparent weakness of spatial cues for ASA may simply show that they interact strongly with other ASA cues (c.f., recent research in the author's lab). (3) The power...
The contribution of temporal asynchrony, spatial separation, and frequency separation to the cross-spectral fusion of temporally contiguous brief narrow-band noise bursts was studied using the Rhythmic Masking Release paradigm (RMR). RMR involves the discrimination of one of two possible rhythms, despite perceptual masking of the rhythm by an irreg...
The contribution of temporal asynchrony, spatial separation, and frequency separation to the cross-spectral fusion of temporally contiguous brief narrow-band noise bursts was studied using the Rhythmic Masking Release paradigm RMR. RMR involves the discrimination of one of two possible rhythms, despite perceptual masking of the rhythm by an irregul...
Normally hearing adults heard rapid alternations of a pair of band-limited noise bursts that had flat spectra (in terms of equal-loudness weighting of components) and sharp band edges. The bursts differed in center frequency (CF), but were matched on overall intensity, on bandwidth (BW) on a log frequency scale, and (roughly) on pitch strength. Lis...
Adult listeners rated the difficulty of hearing a single coherent stream in a sequence of high (H) and low (L) tones that alternated in a repetitive galloping pattern (HLH-HLH-HLH...). They could hear the gallop when the sequence was perceived as a single stream, but when it segregated into two substreams, they heard H-H- ... in one stream and L-L-...
The Rhythmic Masking Release paradigm (RMR) was used to study how onset asynchrony, harmonic ratios and speakers separation interact toward the cross?spectral grouping of concurrent complex tones. In RMR, a regular sequence is perceptually masked by some irregularly spaced masking sounds, which are acoustically identical to those of the rhythm. The...
Two auditory phenomena--stream segregation and illusory continuity through a wide-band noise interruption--were studied to determine whether the same principles of perceptual organization applied to both. A cycle was formed of a repeating alternation of two short bursts of narrow-band noise (NBN), one centered at a high frequency (H) and the other...
In four experiments, the accumulation, over time, of a tendency to hear separate high and low streams in a sequence of high (H) and low (L) tones, presented in a galloping rhythm (HLH-HLH-...), was studied. Each trial was composed of two parts, an induction sequence, then a test sequence, with no break between them. The test sequence was always hea...
Spectral factors such as differences in harmonic content are powerful cues in the perceptual organization of tone sequences. Temporal features such as rise time, however, have been shown to be poor cues [W. M. Hartmann and D. Johnson, Mus. Perc. 9, 155-184 (1991)]. The relative influence of these timbral features on perceptual segregation was inves...
The perceptual organization of sequences of short‐duration 200‐Hz‐wide modulated noise bands was investigated. Sequences with one of two possible rhythms were presented over headphones or in a semi‐circular array of 13 speakers. The ‘‘rhythm’’ was embedded in an irregular sequence of ‘‘maskers’’ with the same frequencies and energy. Adding ‘‘flanke...
Many kinds of events in the environment give rise to acoustic
pressure waves. Typically, the sounds are overlapped in time and in
frequency. Yet, despite this mixing, our auditory systems can recover
separate descriptions for each separate sound-producing event, a
capacity called auditory scene analysis (ASA). The computational
modelling of ASA has...
Experiments on young adults studied the effects of suddenness of onset or offset on the discrimination of the order of pitches of individual tones in a 1-s, 4-tone cluster of overlapping pure tones. In experiment 1, the tones, all within a critical band, went on asynchronously. Each rose and decayed linearly in amplitude. Faster onsets, within the...
Three experiments were conducted to determine whether attention may be allocated to a specific frequency region. On each trial, a frequency cue was presented and was followed by a target tone. The cue indicated the most likely frequency of the forthcoming target about which the listeners were required to make a duration judgment. It was reasoned th...
The question of whether sudden increases in the amplitude of pure-tone components would perceptually isolate them from a more complex spectrum was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, a 3.5-sec noise was played as a masker. During the noise, two pure-tone components of different frequencies appeared in succession. Subjects were asked t...
Three experiments were conducted to determine whether attention may be allocated to a specific frequency region. On each trial,
a frequency cue was presented and was followed by a target tone. The cue indicated the most likely frequency of the forthcoming
target about which the listeners were required to make a duration judgment. It was reasoned th...
In audition, sound energy is assigned to separate auditory "streams" following principles of organization that closely parallel the visual gestalt principles that guide the perception of distinct forms or objects. Metzger (1934) provided evidence for organization in vision based on similarity in the velocity of moving forms. If two dots approach on...
Many natural listening environments face the auditory system with a jumble of overlapping sound?producing events, from which it must recover separate descriptions of the individual sounds(auditory scene analysis). Its most basic method is ??primitive?? auditory grouping, a pre?attentive process that analyzes the incoming signal into components and...
Spectral factors such as differences in harmonic content are powerful cues in the organization of tonal sequences. Temporal factors such as rise time, however, have been shown to be poor cues [W. M. Hartmann and D. Johnson, Mus. Perc. 9(2), 155–184 (1991)]. The relative salience of these factors was investigated further using complex tones sequence...
Three theories of auditory stream segregation were evaluated. In two-part trials, subjects heard an induction sequence, whose effects upon an immediately subsequent test sequence were measured. The rhythm and total duration of Induction Sequence tones were varied in two experiments. The similarity between induction and test sequences aided segregat...
This experiment was an investigation of the ability of listeners to identify the constituents of double vowels (pairs of synthetic
vowels, presented concurrently and binaurally). Three variables were manipulated: (1) the size of the difference in FO between
the constituents (0, 1/2, and 6 semitones); (2) the frequency relations among the sinusoids...
The third-formant (F3) transition of a three-formant /da/ or /ga/ syllable was extracted and replaced by sine-wave transitions that followed the F3 centre frequency. The syllable without the F3 transition (base) was always presented at the left ear, and a /da/ (falling) or /ga/ (rising) sine-wave transition could be presented at either the left, th...
Maskers comprising four noise bands derived from same or different noise sources, and multiplied by same or different modulators, were compared for their efficacy in enabling perceptual segregation of a tone embedded in one of the bands. A two‐interval paradigm was used, with a 1‐kHz target tone followed by two noise bursts. The target tone was eit...
Harmonic relations are important in the perceptual fusion of frequency components, but other factors can influence how much any given harmonic is integrated into a complex tone. This study considers whether the pattern of spectral spacing can act as such a factor. A complex tone consisting only of odd-numbered harmonics has a regular harmonic spaci...
Harmonic relations are important in the perceptual fusion of frequency components, but other factors can influence how much any given harmonic is integrated into a complex tone. This study considers whether the pattern of harmonic spacing can act as such a factor. A complex tone consisting only of odd‐numbered harmonics has a regular harmonic spaci...
The perceptual grouping of a four-tone cycle was studied as a function of differences in fundamental frequencies and the frequencies of spectral peaks. Each tone had a single formant and at least 13 harmonics. In Experiment 1 the formant was created by filtering a flat spectrum and in Experiment 2 by adding harmonics. Fundamental frequency was foun...
In the present experiment, auditory stream organization was investigated in the presence of perceptually restored continuity. It was found that auditory streaming processes tend to yield the same perceptual organization independently of the presence or absence of perceptual restoration. Other observations include the dominance of frequency proximit...
In the present experiment, auditory stream organization was investigated in the presence of perceptually restored continuity.
It was found that auditory streaming processes tend to yield the same perceptual organization independently of the presence
or absence of perceptual restoration. Other observations include the dominance of frequency proximit...
The fusion of two amplitude-modulated (AM) tones presented simultaneously was studied. Subjects were presented with an AM tone (A) followed by a copy of itself (B) which was accompanied by another AM tone (C). In different experiments, the subjects were asked either to rate how clearly they could hear Tone B in the BC mixture or whether Tone B was...
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The fusion of two amplitude-modulated (AM)tones presented simultaneously was studied. Subjects were presented with an AM tone
(A) followed by a copy of itself (B) which was accompanied by another AM tone (C). In different experiments, the subjects
were asked either to rate how clearly they could hear Tone B in the BC mixture or whether Tone B was p...
Auditory scene analysis (ASA) is defined and the problem of partitioning the time-varying spectrum resulting from mixtures of individual acoustic signals is described. Some basic facts about ASA are presented. These include causes and effects of auditory organization (sequential, simultaneous, and the old-plus-new heuristic). Processes employing di...
In the experiments reported here, we attempted to find out more about how the auditory system is able to separate two simultaneous harmonic sounds. Previous research (Halikia & Bregman, 1984a, 1984b; Scheffers, 1983a) had indicated that a difference in fundamental frequency (F0) between two simultaneous vowel sounds improves their separate identifi...
This study evaluates the role of item predictability in auditory temporal coherence. Thirteen normal-hearing subjects were required to hold together long tonal sequences as single strings of notes. Temporal and spectral predictability of successive notes in a sequence varied as a function of experimental condition. As the frequency separation of th...
When a formant transition and the remainder of a syllable are presented to subjects' opposite ears, most subjects perceive two simultaneous sounds: a syllable and a nonspeech chirp. It has been demonstrated that, when the remainder of the syllable (base) is kept unchanged, the identity of the perceived syllable will depend on the kind of transition...
When a formant transition and the remainder of a syllable are presented to subjects’ opposite ears, most subjects perceive
two simultaneous sounds: a syllable and a nonspeech chirp. It has been demonstrated that, when the remainder of the syllable
(base) is kept unchanged, the identity of the perceived syllable will depend on the kind of transition...
Perceived continuity was studied by varying the direction (steady-state, upward glide, or downward glide), the frequency separation,
and the slope of two sinusoidal tones separated by a louder burst of white noise. When the two tones had different directions,
continuity was perceived according to a frequency-proximity principle (frequency-interpola...
In my previous research I have tried to discover how processes of auditory “scene analysis” help the listener to recognize patterns by sorting out those features of the signal that are likely to have arisen from the same source. In this work, I have often found that the scene analysis process seemed to be obeying this rule: each bit of acoustic evi...
The psychoacoustic theory of “auditory stream segregation” brings a set of vital new concepts to music theory. The present paper explores some of the ways that these concepts can inform our understanding of the patterns of polyphonic music. The authors introduce music theorists to some of the ideas and research that have evolved into the theory of...
In 3 experiments, 39 university students were required to judge the stream organization of patterns consisting of the elements of an ascending sequence of tones presented in rapid alternation with the elements of a descending sequence. The principle of grouping tones by their frequency proximity was found to dominate over the principle of grouping...
Alcoholic and non-alcoholic subjects received a test of the ability to identify speech presented against competing speech (Synthetic Sentence Identification) and a test of field dependence (Embedded-Figures Test (EFT). Performance on the speech task (which involved auditory figure-ground differentiation) bore no special relationship to performance...
The perceptual integration of a mixture of two complex tones was studied in experiments on adult subjects. Each tone was formed
by amplitude modulation (AM) of a carrier sinusoid of frequency (CF) by a raised sinusoid with modulation frequency (MF).
One tone always had CF = 1500 Hz and MF = 100 Hz. The other had different CFs around 500 Hz and diff...
Adult listeners heard a pure-tone glide (“captor”) repeatedly alternating with a complex glide consisting of three simultaneous
pure-tone glides. One of the pure-tone glide components in the complex glide matched the captor glide in its frequency center,
orientation, and direction. This component was referred to as the “target.” The two other glide...
We studied the perceptual integration of two complex tones, each sent to both ears and formed by amplitude modulation (AM) of a carrier frequency CF by a sinusoid with modulation frequency MF. One tone always had CF = 1500 Hz and MF = 100 Hz. The other had CFs around 500 Hz and MFs around 100 Hz. Both harmonic and inharmonic partials, produced by A...
Evidence from several laboratories suggests a generalization that organizes several facts about auditory organization. It goes as follows: There are two ?forces? of primary perceptual organization, a sequential one that organizes acoustic components sequentially into streams, and a simultaneous one that fuses components into pitch and timbre struct...
When a pair of monaural pure tones, A and B, are repeatedly alternated in one ear, with noise bursts presented in synchrony with B in the other ear, the noise sometimes delateralizes B. This is presumably a case of Warren and Bashford's (1976) contralateral induction effect. However, the present experiment shows that the degree of contralateral ind...
When a pair of monaural pure tones, A and B, are repeatedly alternated in one ear, with noise bursts presented in synchrony with B in the other ear, the noise sometimes delateralizes B. This is presumably a case of R. M. Warren and J. A. Bashford's contralateral induction effect. Three experiments with 23 college students demonstrated that the degr...
When a component of a complex tone is captured into a stream by other events that precede and follow it, it does not fuse
with the other components of the complex tone but tends to to be heard as a separate event. The current study examined the
ability of elements of a stream to resist becoming fused with other synchronous events, heard either in t...
If two sinusoidal glides, Y and Z, synchronous in onset and offset, glide in parallel on a log frequency scale, they fuse
and sound like a single rich glide. However, it is possible to capture Y (the target) into a sequential stream by using as
a captor a pure tone glide, X, that precedes the YZ glide in a repeating cycle. The cycle then breaks per...
When a sequence of two tones is presented over headphones in an ascending or descending order of pitch, it is heard as correspondingly
ascending or descending in space. The illusion of spatial change that accompanies pitch change can be induced onto a pair
of noise bursts by presenting them in synchrony with the tones. When cues known to produce st...
The auditory system appears to begin listening to an input with a basis toward hearing the input as a single stream, but it gradually accumulates evidence over a period of seconds which may lead to the input's being split into substreams. Several seconds of silence or of unpatterned noise slowly remove the bias of the mechanism in favor of these st...
The present experiments looked at the effect of a number of variables on the tendency of an element of a complex tone to either
fuse with the other elements of the tone or be “pulled out” into a “horizontal,” temporal stream. It was found that such factors
as the intensity relationship of the elements of the complex tone, the frequency of the tone...
It has been proposed that auditory stream splitting in rapid tone sequences occurs whenever a tone falls outside some critical
region surrounding its predecessor and some tracking mechanism cannot shift its frequency setting fast enough. If this were
true, a certain pair of tones would split apart or not, depending on their separation in time and f...
In a natural environment, the auditory system must analyze an incoming
wave train to determine 2 things: (a) which series of frequency components
arose over time from the same source and should be integrated into
a sequential stream, and (b) which set of simultaneous components
arose from one source and should be fused into a timbre structure.
In 4...
Two experiments with a total of 50 college students investigated the illusion of a soft tone sounding continuously when it was actually alternating with a burst of louder noise. It was found that brief changes in the amplitude of the tones, introduced before and after the noise burst, reduced the illusion of continuity; this reduction was greater w...
This essay is a discussion of whether or not there are units out of which human perception, cognition, and action are constructed. It proposes that while these human activities are indeed generated from component aspects, we cannot talk of these aspects as “units” or as being directly inserted into these activities. Instead, we must describe them a...
When two different sounds continuously alternate at high speed, they segregate into two perceptual streams. The present article shows that this segregation produces a loss of information regarding the sequential relations of the sounds so that they seem perceptually to be overlapped in time. The segregation (and its contribution to perceived overla...
The present study investigates the effect on auditory stream segregation of the duration of silent gaps between items of a repeating sequence of sine tone stimuli. While previous investigators had shown that gaps reduced the tendency for items to segregate, the present experiment showed that this was not the case; rather, in adjusting tone duration...
When auditory material segregates into "streams," is the unattended stream actually organized as an entity? An experiment with 13 college students suggests an affirmative answer by the observation that the organizational structure of the unattended material interacted with the structure of material to which the S was trying to attend. Specifically,...
A visual analog of auditory stream segregation occurs when a dot moving in discrete, jumps, alternates between positions on
two regular trajectories. At slow speeds, one dot in irregular motion is seen. At higher speeds, two dots are seen, each moving
in a regular trajectory.
Subjects were given 3200 presentations of sentences in a miniature artificial language under two conditions: Sentences were presented either alone or with pictures they described. There was virtually no learning of syntax in the former condition but excellent learning in the latter. After syntax was learned via the mediation of pictures, the syntac...
Examined the finding by R. Warren, C. Obusek, R. Farmer, and R. Warren (see record) that listeners were unable to judge the order of 3 or 4 nonspeech sounds presented in a repetitive cycle. 2 experiments with 32 and 21 undergraduates show that at high presentation rates of a short cycle of 3 high and 3 low tones, Ss invariably segregated the tone s...
Following adaptation, Ss learned visually presented paired associate (PA) word lists, while “distracting” verbal material was read aloud to them. Skin resistance was recorded. Ss who received auditory “interference” containing words present in the PA task made fewer errors than controls. An objective scoring method showed that GSR peaks following t...
Obtained forgetting curves by presenting nouns 1 at a time in a long sequence with recall tests interspersed in the series. 4 types of cues were used in tests: contiguous nouns, phonetic attributes, graphic attributes, and semantic attributes. Curves obtained with each cue could be factored into a short- and a long-term memory component. Recall wit...
An experiment is reported of which the purpose was to test the hypothesis that the memory for simple aspects of syntactic structure is held in the form of single, unitary, independent aspects of the memory traces for English sentences. Twenty 5-word sentences were presented to Ss for a single trial and then Ss were to identify the grammatical form...
The retention of partial information concerning paired associates was shown as follows. After one paired presentation of either short word-short word pairs or simple design single letter pairs, adult Ss were provided with all the stimuli and responses and asked to match them. They were then asked to give a second guess by rearranging only the pairi...