Principles of perceptual grouping in auditory perception

Our every-day acoustic environment typically consists of spectrally complex and continuously time-varying sounds. Such sounds are very often created by several independent sound sources. Our auditory system is able, partly through its basic construction and partly through a life-long learning process, to partition a total acoustic image into clusters of perceptual elements that may allow recognition of the sound sources. This paper reviews some general acoustic principles which govern perceptual grouping, for spectrally complex single sounds as well as for simultaneous sequences of sounds