A really complicated problem: Auditory scene analysis

It has been more than a decade since Al Bregman and other authors brought the challenge of auditory scene analysis back to the attention of auditory science. While a lot of research has been done on and around this topic, an accepted theory of auditory scene analysis has not evolved. Auditory science has little, if any, information about how the nervous system solves this problem, and there have not been any major successes in developing computational methods that solve the problem for most real-world auditory scenes. I will argue that the major reason that more has not been accomplished is that auditory scene analysis is a really hard problem. If one starts with a single sound source and tries to understand how the auditory system determines this single source, the problem is already very complicated without adding other sources that occur at the same time as is the typical depiction of the auditory scene. In this paper I will illustrate some of the challenges that exist for determining the auditory scene that have not received a lot of attention, as well as some of the more discussed aspects of the challenge. [Work supported by NIDCD.]