Thinking in Sound The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition

The realm of auditory cognition is increasingly being recognized as an important new area of psychological and musicological research, however until now no single work has presented the subject in a comprehensive manner for the benefit of researchers and students. To rectify this situation a special tutorial workshop organized by the French Acoustical Society was held at IRCAM, the music research institute founded by Pierre Boulez. Specialists in perceptual organization, memory, attention, music psychology, neurospsychology, and developmental psychology were invited from Europe and North America. This volume presents the materials from their lectures. The book will be useful to advanced students in the cognitive sciences and scientists specializing in many fields as well as in auditory psychology.

The realm of auditory cognition is beginning to affirm itself as a new research orientation. Until now, no volume has existed that covers in a didactic fashion the whole range of subjects in this domain. To rectify this situation a special tutorial workshop organized by the French Acoustical Society was held at IRCAM, the music research institute founded by Pierre Boulez. Specialists in perceptual organization, memory, attention, music psychology, neurospsychology, and developmental psychology were invited from Europe and North America. The chapters of this book present the materials from their lectures. The book will be useful to advanced students in the cognitive sciences and scientists specializing in many fields as well as in auditory psychology.

1 - Introduction to auditory cognition
2 - Auditory scene analysis: hearing in complex environments
3 - Perception of acoustic sequences: global integration versus temporal resolution
4 - Attending to auditory events: the role of temporal organization
5 - Auditory memory
6 - Recognition of sound sources and events
7 - Auditory agnosia: a functional analysis
8 - Contributions of music to research on human auditory cognition
9 - Listening strategies in infancy: the roots of music and language development