Connectionist Models for Auditory Scene Analysis

Although the visual and auditory systems share the same basic tasks of informing an organism about its environment, most connectionist workon hearing to date has been devoted to the very different problem of speech recognition. VVe believe that the most fundamental task of the auditory system is the analysis of acoustic signals into components corresponding to individual sound sources, which Bregman has called auditory scene analysis. Computational and connectionist work on auditory scene analysis is reviewed, and the outline of a general model that includes these approaches is described.