Listening to environmental scenes in real time

Abstract

Our perception of auditory environmental scenes depends on both the context in which the sources occur and the way in which we listen to them (if we are focused on some sources or not). This study investigates processing differences for a single source depending on its context of occurrence. A tone-detection paradigm adapted to an everyday listening context compares the ability to detect tones in a focused stream within three 10- second non-focused streams: an environmental scene, a white noise and a silence. We predict fluctuations in detection times as a function of the number of streams in the context and of the changes occurring in the non-focused stream.