Listening: Flexibility through Noise, Resonance through Rhythm

Our perceptual systems provide us with information about the world around us and the things within it. However, understanding this apparently simple function is surprisingly difficult. In this chapter we focus on auditory perception and the ways in which we use sound to obtain information of the behaviour of objects in our environment. After a brief description of the auditory system, we discuss auditory scene analysis and the problem of partitioning the combined information from an unknown number of sources into the discrete perceptual objects with which we interact. Through this discussion, we conclude that auditory processing is shaped by the need to flexibly engage with the rhythms of living organisms and temporal regularities in the world.