Using brief glimpses to decompose mixtures
Albert S. Bregman · 1991
The processes of perceiving speech and music differ in many ways. However, there is a basic process common to the two. I have called it primitive auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990). The name scene analysis refers to the problem that any sense modality must face when it encounters more than one external object or event at the same time. It must decide which bits of sensory evidence have arisen from the same environmental event or object. There seem to be two approaches to solving this problem: primitive scene analysis and schema-based scene analysis. The primitive approach works without specific knowledge of particular classes of signals, whereas the schema-based approach uses knowledge of specific classes of events and objects in the world. For example, in speech perception, schema-based segregation would use knowledge of the acoustic patterns of a particular language and of a particular speaker, and perhaps of the properties of the human vocal tract. In music perception, schema-based segregation would take advantage of the perceiver’s knowledge of the type of music, the types of instruments, and even the particular piece being played, if the listener was familiar with it.