Auditory perception

Written by : Fairuz Binti Mahamad Rodzi 03008271 The Faculty of Medicine Trisakti Jakarta, 2011

INDEX 1. Abstract ..2 2. Introduction 3 3. Disscussion .5 3.1 Auditory discrimination 3.2 Phonological awareness 3.3 Propagation of sound 3.4 Perception of sound 3.5 Physics of sound 3.6 Sound wave properties and characteristics 3.7 Speed of sound 3.8 Acoustics 3.9 Auditory Object 3.10 3.11 Auditory event Spatial hearing

4. Varieties of Auditory Perception19 4.1 Musical Listening 4.2 Speech Perception 4.3 Crossmodal Illusions 5. References21

1. Abstract

The philosophy of sounds and auditory perception is one emerging area of the philosophy of perception that reaches beyond vision for insights about the nature, objects, contents, and varieties of perception. This entry characterizes critical issues in the philosophy of auditory perception, which bear upon theorizing about perception more generally, and mentions outstanding questions and promising future areas for inquiry in this developing literature. Before beginning the substantive discussion of audition itself, it is worthwhile to discuss the motivation and rationale for this kind of work.

Philosophical thinking about perception has focused on vision. The philosophical puzzle of perception and proposed solutions have been shaped by concern for visual experience and illusions. Questions about the nature of perceptual content have been framed and evaluated in visual terms, and detailed accounts of what we perceive frequently address just the visual case. Vision informs our understanding of perception's epistemological role and its role in guiding action. It is not a great exaggeration to say that much of the philosophy of perception translates roughly as philosophy of visual perception.

2. Introduction

Auditory perception is the ability to perceive and understand sounds, usually with specific organs, such as a human's ears. Sound exists in the form of vibrations that travel through the air or through other substances. Ears detect such vibrations and convert them into nerve impulses, which are then sent to the brain where they can be interpreted. Deafness describes a condition in which individuals have no auditory perception; deaf individuals are not capable of perceiving or interpreting sounds. Different animals can perceive different sounds; dogs, for example, are capable of perceiving very high-pitched sounds that humans cannot perceive.

There are many factors that affect auditory perception beyond simply hearing sounds. The brain is largely responsible for many processes that can turn a mass of incoming noise into something useful and understandable. Auditory discrimination is the process by which one is able to note the differences between sounds; this is extremely important to language as spoken words are understood based on different sounds. Discrimination between foreground and background is also an important part of auditory discrimination. It is important to be able to focus on important noises and to ignore irrelevant and unimportant noises so that one is not overwhelmed by a vast amount of noise. Auditory synthesis is another process very important to the comprehension of language. It describes the process by which the brain combines different sounds into understandable units, similar to the way letters are combined into words and words into sentences. Auditory sequencing is a process closely related to both memory and auditory perception. It describes the ability to understand and remember the order in which certain sounds happened.

Individuals who have hearing problems may simply have difficulty hearing quiet sounds or extreme pitches. They may also, however, have problems with the above processes that are essential to making sense of sounds. Problems with auditory perception can exist from birth, or they can be caused by injuries to the brain or ears. They are generally easy to detect; one with hearing problems either cannot hear well or cannot make sense of the sounds that he hears.

Some children suffer from a loss of auditory perception from birth. There are many ways to detect hearing problems in children. Often, they do not understand or respond to auditory signals or commands. They ask for directions to be repeated, often several times. In many cases, they watch what others are doing before taking any action of their own.

3. Discussion

3.1 Auditory discrimination

A doctor can diagnose an auditory discrimination disorder after tests have shown there are no physical hearing problems. Children with auditory discrimination disabilities often fall behind in school, particularly in reading and spelling, because they lack the phonological awareness needed to make relationships between sounds and the symbols that represent them.

The brain is largely responsible for many processes that can turn a mass of incoming noise into something useful and understandable. Auditory discrimination is the process by which one is able to note the differences between sounds; this is extremely important to language as spoken words are understood based on different sounds. Auditory discrimination refers to the brain's ability to organize and make sense of language sounds. Children with auditory discrimination difficulties might have trouble understanding and developing language skills because their brains either misinterpret language sounds, or process them too slowly. Often, these children cannot differentiate between similar sounds, or they are unable to recognize language in certain situations.

3.2 Phonological awareness

Language is made up of phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest possible sound in a word, and is not necessarily related to spelling. For example, the word "night" has three phonemes: the "n" sound, the "eye" sound, and the "t" sound. When we listen to language, our brains organize the different sounds into meaningful chunks that we can interpret as words. This is called phonological awareness.

People with auditory discrimination disorders may appear to be deaf or hard of hearing. They might not respond to spoken language if there is background noise, or they might understand sounds incorrectly. Problems with auditory discrimination are usually related to the brain rather than to the ear itself. It means the person can hear, but he or she hears things "wrong." A doctor can diagnose an auditory discrimination disorder after tests have shown there are no physical hearing problems.

Children with auditory discrimination disabilities often fall behind in school, particularly in reading and spelling, because they lack the phonological awareness needed to make relationships between sounds and the symbols that represent them. Sometimes they appear to

have speech impediments or a stammer because they cannot accurately produce the language sounds they can't hear properly. These children may also be unable to understand a teacher who is not facing them or addressing them directly, or they will have difficulty picking out language sounds if there is any background noise.

The Wepman's Auditory Discrimination Test (WADT) is an assessment tool that is commonly used to diagnose auditory processing disorders in young children. In this test, a child is seated so that she can't see the examiner. The examiner reads a series of minimal pairs, or words that differ by only one phoneme such as "bit/pit" or "ship/sheep." Some of the pairs of words have no differences, and the child is given a score based on how many pairs she correctly identifies as the same or different. Other tests might involve asking a child to repeat words back to an examiner, or say a word back with a sound missing.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and mentally manipulate the sounds (phonemes), sound sequences, and sound structures in a syllable or word. The term is often used interchangeably with

phonological awareness; strictly speaking, there is a difference, but the two terms overlap enough that the only people who truly care about the differences between them are nerds like me.

Good phonological awareness skills make learning to read, write, and spell a lot easier. Children and adults who are strong readers and good spellers also tend to be strong in phonological awareness. It is possible to develop literacy without strong phonological awareness; deaf people, for example, are often able to read and write quite effectively in English, even though they cannot hear the sounds of the language. In general, however, a child with poor phonological skills will often have to work much harder to learn to read and write at grade level.

But phonological awareness is not just important for literacy. Most conversation does not take place in a soundproof booth with just one person talking at a time. By enabling us to "fill in the gaps" in what we hear, good phonemic awareness helps us process speech in noisy places and over bad telephone connections.

I have listed below ten stages of phonemic awareness, in typical order of development. In other words, pre-phonemic listening is generally the first of these skills to develop, followed by rhyming, segmentation, isolation, and so on. Weak skills at any one of these levels will probably limit development of later-developing skills.

Pre-phonemic discriminatory listening skills: the ability to distinguish among non-speech environmental sounds (e.g., a beanbag falling on a wooden floor versus a plastic ball falling on a

wooden floor), and to identify objects by the sound they make (e.g., a horn, a bell, a helicopter, etc.)

Alliteration and rhyme: the ability to identify and produce words that rhyme or that begin with the same phoneme.

Phoneme Segmentation: the ability to analyze the syllables and individual phonemes of a word, phrase, or sentence.

Phoneme Isolation: the ability to identify the first, middle, or last phonemes in a monosyllabic word.

Phoneme Deletion: the ability to identify how a word would sound if a part of it were omitted.

Phoneme Substitution: the ability to replace a phoneme in a word with another phoneme to form a new word.

Phoneme Blending: the ability to identify a word when hearing parts of the word presented in isolation.

Letter-sound correspondence: the ability to identify the phonemes represented by individual letters and combinations of letters.

Phonetic reading: the ability to "sound out" and pronounce unfamiliar or nonsense words based on spelling.

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Phonetic spelling: the ability to use prior knowledge of spelling rules to write familiar words the student has not learned to spell.

Phonemic Awareness: Playing With Sounds to Strengthen Beginning Reading Skills is a nicelydone workbook with a wealth of phonemic awareness activities. It's designed for teachers of preschool to early elementary grades, but all the activities are user-friendly and can easily be adapted for use at home.

A child with a phonemic awareness disorder may be misdiagnosed as having an articulation disorder. Like children with articulation disorders, children with poor phonological awareness mispronounce many words, especially in the early stages of speech development and have no particular trouble with longer, more phonologically complex words.

However, a deficit in phonological awareness is not an articulation disorder. A child with an articulation disorder mispronounces certain sounds due to lack of oral motor coordination or bad habits formed when learning to speak. A child with a phonological awareness deficit may be able to pronounce all sounds correctly, but has trouble analyzing what sounds are part of a word, and in what order they occur. A child with PAD may say mat clearly, but be unable to tell you what the beginning sound is, or where the /t/ sound comes in the word.

It is also important to remember that children that are not deaf or hard of hearing can have a phonemic awareness deficit. Their difficulties are not a result of difficulty hearing speech, but a lack of awareness about the sound structures of words. Deafness or hearing loss can
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certainly contribute to difficulties with phonological awareness, and make treatment more difficult, but many children with this disorder have hearing in the average normal range.

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.[1]

3.3 Propagation of sound

Sound is a sequence of waves of pressure that propagates through compressible media such as air or water. (Sound can propagate through solids as well, but there are additional modes of propagation). During propagation, waves can be reflected, refracted, or attenuated by the medium.[2]

The behavior of sound propagation is generally affected by three things:

A relationship between density and pressure. This relationship, affected by temperature, determines the speed of sound within the medium.

The propagation is also affected by the motion of the medium itself. For example, sound moving through wind. Independent of the motion of sound through the medium, if the medium is moving, the sound is further transported.

The viscosity of the medium also affects the motion of sound waves. It determines the rate at which sound is attenuated. For many media, such as air or water, attenuation due to viscosity is negligible.

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When sound is moving through a medium that does not have constant physical properties, it may be refracted (either dispersed or focused).[2]

3.4 Perception of sound

Human ear

The perception of sound in any organism is limited to a certain range of frequencies. For humans, hearing is normally limited to frequencies between about 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz (20 kHz)[3], although these limits are not definite. The upper limit generally decreases with age. Other species have a different range of hearing. For example, dogs can perceive vibrations higher than 20 kHz, but are deaf to anything below 40 Hz. As a signal perceived by one of the major senses, sound is used by many species for detecting danger, navigation, predation, and communication. Earth's atmosphere, water, and virtually any physical phenomenon, such as fire, rain, wind, surf, or earthquake, produces (and is characterized by) its unique sounds. Many species, such as frogs, birds, marine and terrestrial mammals, have also developed special organs to produce sound. In some species, these produce song and speech. Furthermore, humans have developed culture and technology (such as music, telephone and radio) that allows them to
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generate, record, transmit, and broadcast sound. The scientific study of human sound perception is known as psychoacoustics.

3.5 Physics of sound

The mechanical vibrations that can be interpreted as sound are able to travel through all forms of matter: gases, liquids, solids, and plasmas. The matter that supports the sound is called the medium. Sound cannot travel through a vacuum.

Longitudinal and transverse waves

Sinusoidal waves of various frequencies; the bottom waves have higher frequencies than those above. The horizontal axis represents time.

Sound is transmitted through gases, plasma, and liquids as longitudinal waves, also called compression waves. Through solids, however, it can be transmitted as both longitudinal waves and transverse waves. Longitudinal sound waves are waves of alternating pressure deviations from the equilibrium pressure, causing local regions of compression and rarefaction, while transverse waves (in solids) are waves of alternating shear stress at right angle to the direction of propagation.

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Matter in the medium is periodically displaced by a sound wave, and thus oscillates. The energy carried by the sound wave converts back and forth between the potential energy of the extra compression (in case of longitudinal waves) or lateral displacement strain (in case of transverse waves) of the matter and the kinetic energy of the oscillations of the medium.

3.6 Sound wave properties and characteristics

Sound waves are often simplified to a description in terms of sinusoidal plane waves, which are characterized by these generic properties:

Frequency, or its inverse, the period Wavelength Wavenumber Amplitude Sound pressure Sound intensity Speed of sound Direction

Sometimes speed and direction are combined as a velocity vector; wavenumber and direction are combined as a wave vector.

Transverse waves, also known as shear waves, have the additional property, polarization, and are not a characteristic of sound waves.

3.7 Speed of sound

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The speed of sound depends on the medium the waves pass through, and is a fundamental property of the material. In general, the speed of sound is proportional to the square root of the ratio of the elastic modulus (stiffness) of the medium to its density. Those physical properties and the speed of sound change with ambient conditions. For example, the speed of sound in gases depends on temperature. In 20 C (68 F) air at the sea level, the speed of sound is approximately 343 m/s (1,230 km/h; 767 mph) using the formula "v = (331 + 0.6 T) m/s". In fresh water, also at 20 C, the speed of sound is approximately 1,482 m/s (5,335 km/h; 3,315 mph). In steel, the speed of sound is about 5,960 m/s (21,460 km/h; 13,330 mph).[6] The speed of sound is also slightly sensitive (a second-order anharmonic effect) to the sound amplitude, which means that there are nonlinear propagation effects, such as the production of harmonics and mixed tones not present in the original sound (see parametric array).

3.8 Acoustics

Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including 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 or audio engineer. The application of acoustics can be seen in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.

3.9 Auditory Object The term auditory object identification has eluded researchers in the recent years; many fail to define precisely the term, while others prefer to use the term auditory event instead; thus object being the source of the sound, while event refers to the action. Identifying an
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auditory object requires many psychological factors, of each must considered, such as attention, auditory experience, acoustic cues that listeners use to identify such sounds, and the role of language in naming auditory objects

3.10 Auditory event

Auditory events describe the subjective perception, when listening to a certain sound situation. This term was introduced by Jens Blauert (Ruhr-University Bochum) in the year 1966, in order to distinguish clearly between the physical sound field and the auditory perception of the sound. [1]

Auditory events are the central objects of psychoacoustical investgations. Focus of these investigations is the relationship between the characteristics of a physical sound field and the corresponding perception of listeners. From this relationship conclusions can be drawn about the processing methods of the human auditory system.

Aspects of auditory event investigations can be:

is there an auditory event? Is a certain sound noticeable? => Determination of perception thresholds like hearing threshold, auditory masking thresholds etc.

Which characteristics has the auditory event? => Determination of loudness, pitch, sound, harshness etc.

How is the spatial impression of the auditory event? => Determination of sound localization, lateralization, perceived direction etc.
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When can differences in auditory events be noticed? How big are the discrimination possibilities of the auditory system? => Determination of just noticeable differences

Relationships between sound field and auditory events

The sound field is described by physical quantities, while auditory events are described by quantities of psychoacoustical perception. Below you can find a list with physical sound field quantities and the related psychoacoustical quantities of corresponding auditory events. Mostly there is no simple or proportional relationship between sound field characteristics and auditory events. For example the auditory event property loudness depends not only on the physical quantity sound pressure but also on the spectral characteristics of the sound and on the sound history.

sound field characteristics sound pressure level frequency spectrum position of a sound source

auditory event loudness pitch timbre sound localization

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3.11 Spatial hearing

Auditory-like algorithms may decode information from the input signals to the ear that allows assessment of the spatial position of sound sources. They may further be used for predictions of how humans form the positions and spatial extents of their auditory events, how they establish an auditory perspective, and how they suppress echoes and reverberance. Typical applications are: source-position finders, tools for the evaluation of architectural acoustics and sound systems (such as spaciousness meters, echo detectors, and precedence indicators,) tools for the evaluation of auditory virtual environments and for psychoacoustic research. There are further perceptual features of auditory events, besides position and spatial extent, which are based on binaural rather than monaural information. Following a usage in the field of productsound design, they may be called binaural psychoacoustic descriptors, as discussed in the next section.

4. Varieties of Auditory Perception

4.1 Musical Listening

Musical listening is a topic that bears on questions about the relationship between hearing sounds and hearing sources. While the philosophy of music has its own vast literature (see the entry on the philosophy of music), musical experience has not been explored extensively in connection with general philosophical questions about auditory perception. This section discusses links that should advance philosophical work on auditory perception.

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4.2 Speech Perception

Speech perception presents uniquely difficult twists, and few philosophers have confronted it directly (Appelbaum 1999, Trout 2001a, Matthen 2005, ch 9, and Remez and Trout 2009 are noteworthy recent exceptions). Something striking and qualitatively distinctiveperhaps uniquely humanseems to set the perception of speech apart from ordinary hearing. The main philosophical issues about speech perception concern versions of the question, Is speech special?

It is natural to think that listening to speech and listening to music are similar. In each case, one's interest in sounds seems divorced from the specific environmental happenings involved in their production. But hearing speech differs from hearing music. Notably, speech is a vehicle for meaning. Ultimately, the information conveyed is what matters. In music, the interest is in sounds as such. In speech, the interest is in meanings.

In one sense, this also makes perceiving speech different from hearing ordinary non-linguistic sounds. Environmental sounds do not usually have conventional linguistic meanings. But, according to the most common philosophical understanding, there is another sense in which perceiving speech is a lot like hearing non-linguistic sounds. Listening to speech in a language you know may involve grasping meanings, but grasping meanings requires first hearing the sounds of speech. What you perceive in perceiving speech is individuated in part in terms of morphological characteristics evident in audition. While grasping the meanings of speech sounds depends upon perceiving complex sound structures, according to the commonplace understanding, perceiving speech involves hearing sounds of a common ontological kind with the ones you hear when you are not hearing speech.

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The commonplace viewthat perceiving speech is a variety of ordinary auditory perception has been challenged in a number of ways. One way to see how the challenges differ is to consider the ways in which they suggests that speech perception differs from hearing nonlinguistic sounds. In what sense, then, is perceiving speech distinctive? The question admits at least three readings.

4.3 Crossmodal Illusions

Auditory perception of speech is influenced by cues from vision and touch (see Gick et al. 2008). The McGurk effect in speech perception is an illusory auditory experience produced by a visual stimulus (McGurk and Macdonald 1976). Do such multimodal effects occur in ordinary audition? Visual and tactile cues commonly do shape auditory experience. The ventriloquist illusion is an illusory auditory experience of location that is produced by an apparent visible sound source (see, e.g., Bertelson 1999). Audition even impacts experience in other modalities. The recently discovered sound-induced flash illusion involves a visual illusion as of seeing two consecutive flashes that is produced when a single visible flash is accompanied by two consecutive audible beeps (Shams et al. 2000, 2002). Such crossmodal illusions demonstrate that auditory experience is impacted by other modalities and that audition influences other modalities. In general, experiences associated with one perceptual modality are influenced by stimulation associated with other modalities.

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5. References 1. What is auditory perception. Wise geek Copyright 2003 - 2011Conjecture Corporation Written By: Daniel Liden. Available from: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-auditoryperception.htm 2. Phonemic awareness affects speech and literacy. Speech-lenguage-development.com. Copyright 2008 2011. Available from: http://www.speech-languagedevelopment.com/phonemic-awareness.html 3. Sound. Wikipedia. Copyright 2008 - 2011 Speech-Language-Development.com. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound

4. Blauert, J.: Spatial hearing - the psychophysics of human sound localization; MIT Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts (1983), chapter 1

5. Auditory event. Wikipedia. 17:46, 15 July 2010 Available at: "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Auditory_event&oldid=373662731"

6. Spatial Thu

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7. Auditory perceptions. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. First published Thu May 14, 2009. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-auditory/#Varieties

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