COMPUTATIONAL AUDITORY SCENE ANALYSIS - PRINCIPLES, ALGORITHMS, AND APPLICATIONS

Human listeners are able to perceptually segregate one sound source from an acoustic mixture, such as a single voice from a mixture of other voices and music at a busy cocktail party. How can we engineer "machine listening" systems that achieve this perceptual feat? Albert Bregman's book Auditory Scene Analysis, published in 1990, drew an analogy between the perception of auditory scenes and visual scenes, and described a coherent framework for understanding the perceptual organization of sound. His account has stimulated much interest in computational studies of hearing. Such studies are motivated in part by the demand for practical sound separation systems, which have many applications including noise-robust automatic speech recognition, hearing prostheses, and automatic music transcription. This emerging field has become known as computational auditory scene analysis (CASA).