Auditory science or hearing science is a field of research and education concerning the perception of sounds by humans, animals, or machines. It is a heavily interdisciplinary field at the crossroad between acoustics, neuroscience, and psychology. [1] It is often related to one or many of these other fields: psychophysics, psychoacoustics, audiology, physiology, otorhinolaryngology, speech science, automatic speech recognition, music psychology, linguistics, and psycholinguistics.
Early auditory research included the early 19th century work of Georg Ohm and August Seebeck and their experiments and arguments about Fourier analysis of sounds. Later in the 19th century, German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz wrote Sensations of Tone describing the founding concepts of psychoacoustics, i.e. the relationship between the physical parameters of a sound and the percept that it induces.
Psychoacoutics is primarily interested in the basic workings of the ear and is, therefore, mostly studied using simple sounds like pure tones. In the 1950s, psychologists George A. Miller and J. C. R. Licklider furthered our knowledge in psychoacoustics and speech perception. [2] [3]
Many members of the auditory science community follow the auditory.org mailing list, known as "the Auditory List".
Global Audiology offers information on the practice of Audiology around thr world and is maintained by the International Society of Audiology.
Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics is present in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.
A harmonic sound is said to have a missing fundamental, suppressed fundamental, or phantom fundamental when its overtones suggest a fundamental frequency but the sound lacks a component at the fundamental frequency itself. The brain perceives the pitch of a tone not only by its fundamental frequency, but also by the periodicity implied by the relationship between the higher harmonics; we may perceive the same pitch even if the fundamental frequency is missing from a tone.
Audiology is a branch of science that studies hearing, balance, and related disorders. Audiologists treat those with hearing loss and proactively prevent related damage. By employing various testing strategies, audiologists aim to determine whether someone has normal sensitivity to sounds. If hearing loss is identified, audiologists determine which portions of hearing are affected, to what degree, and where the lesion causing the hearing loss is found. If an audiologist determines that a hearing loss or vestibular abnormality is present, they will provide recommendations for interventions or rehabilitation.
The ASA Silver Medal is an award presented by the Acoustical Society of America to individuals, without age limitation, for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles or through research accomplishments in acoustics. The medal is awarded in a number of categories depending on the technical committee responsible for making the nomination.
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the reception of such waves and their perception by the brain. Only acoustic waves that have frequencies lying between about 20 Hz and 20 kHz, the audio frequency range, elicit an auditory percept in humans. In air at atmospheric pressure, these represent sound waves with wavelengths of 17 meters (56 ft) to 1.7 centimeters (0.67 in). Sound waves above 20 kHz are known as ultrasound and are not audible to humans. Sound waves below 20 Hz are known as infrasound. Different animal species have varying hearing ranges.
Diplacusis, also known as diplacusis binauralis, binauralis disharmonica or interaural pitch difference (IPD), is a hearing disorder whereby a single auditory stimulus is perceived as different pitches between ears. It is typically experienced as a secondary symptom of sensorineural hearing loss, although not all patients with sensorineural hearing loss experience diplacusis or tinnitus. The onset is usually spontaneous and can occur following an acoustic trauma, for example an explosive noise, or in the presence of an ear infection. Sufferers may experience the effect permanently, or it may resolve on its own. Diplacusis can be particularly disruptive to individuals working within fields requiring acute audition, such as musicians, sound engineers or performing artists.
William M. Hartmann is a noted physicist, psychoacoustician, author, and former president of the Acoustical Society of America. His major contributions in psychoacoustics are in pitch perception, binaural hearing, and sound localization. Working with junior colleagues, he discovered several major pitch effects: the binaural edge pitch, the binaural coherence edge pitch, the pitch shifts of mistuned harmonics, and the harmonic unmasking effect. His textbook, Signals, Sound and Sensation, is widely used in courses on psychoacoustics. He is currently a professor of physics at Michigan State University.
Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of sound perception and audiology—how human auditory system perceives various sounds. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated with sound. Psychoacoustics is an interdisciplinary field of many areas, including psychology, acoustics, electronic engineering, physics, biology, physiology, and computer science.
Barbara Shinn-Cunningham is an American bioengineer and neuroscientist. She is the founding Director of the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute, the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Auditory Neuroscience, and Professor of Psychology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering.
Monita Chatterjee is an auditory scientist and the Director of the Auditory Prostheses & Perception Laboratory at Boys Town National Research Hospital. She investigates the basic mechanisms underlying auditory processing by cochlear implant listeners.
Lloyd Alexander Jeffress was an acoustical scientist, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a developer of mine-hunting models for the US Navy during World War II and after, Jeffress was known to psychologists for his pioneering research on auditory masking in psychoacoustics, his stimulus-oriented approach to signal-detection theory in psychophysics, and his "ingenious" electronic and mathematical models of the auditory process.
Temporal envelope (ENV) and temporal fine structure (TFS) are changes in the amplitude and frequency of sound perceived by humans over time. These temporal changes are responsible for several aspects of auditory perception, including loudness, pitch and timbre perception and spatial hearing.
Brian C.J. Moore FMedSci, FRS is an Emeritus Professor of Auditory Perception in the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. His research focuses on psychoacoustics, audiology, and the development and assessment of hearing aids.
Christian Lorenzi is Professor of Experimental Psychology at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, where he has been Director of the Department of Cognitive Studies and Director of Scientific Studies until. Lorenzi works on auditory perception.
Apparent source width (ASW) is the audible impression of a spatially extended sound source. This psychoacoustic impression results from the sound radiation characteristics of the source and the properties of the acoustic space into which it is radiating. Wide source widths are desired by listeners of music because these are associated with the sound of acoustic music, opera, classical music, and historically informed performance. Research concerning ASW comes from the field of room acoustics, architectural acoustics and auralization, as well as musical acoustics, psychoacoustics and systematic musicology.
Deniz Başkent is a Turkish-born Dutch auditory scientist who works on auditory perception. As of 2018, she is Professor of Audiology at the University Medical Center Groningen, Netherlands.
Robert V. Shannon is Research Professor of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery and Affiliated Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering at University of Southern California, CA, USA. Shannon investigates the basic mechanisms underlying auditory neural processing by users of cochlear implants, auditory brainstem implants, and midbrain implants.
Roy Dunbar Patterson is an auditory neuroscientist in the Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He is a senior research scientist of the UK Medical Research Council and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, from which he received the Silver Medal in Psychological and Physiological Acoustics in 2015.
Sandra Gordon-Salant is an American audiologist. She is a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also director of the doctoral program in clinical audiology. Gordon-Salant investigates the effects of aging and hearing loss on auditory processes, as well as signal enhancement devices for hearing-impaired listeners. She is the senior editor of the 2010 book, The Aging Auditory System. Gordon-Salant has served as editor of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
Judy R. Dubno is an American scientist and researcher in the field of audiology. She is a distinguished university professor and director of research in the department of otolaryngology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. She is recognized for her scientific contributions to the understanding of presbycusis, a condition of hearing loss that occurs gradually for many aging adults. She has been involved in the development and implementation of several new methods for assessing hearing loss, including the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) and Speech Intelligibility Index (SII). She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Jerger Career Award for Research in Audiology in 2011. She served as President of the Acoustical Society of America from 2014 to 2015.