Definition
The process of separating signal from noise is an aspect of the process of auditory scene segmentation in which the pressure waves from multiple, concurrent sound sources that mix in the air must be de-mixed by perceptual processes to generate an auditory object-based model of sound sources in the environment. Sounds that interfere with the detection or discrimination of an informative sound of interest, the signal, are often described as noise. The use of the term “noise” is informed by a long history of psychophysical experiments that measure the adverse effects of adding sounds, usually based on stochastic processes, to more behaviorally relevant signals, such as speech. Neurophysiological experiments have demonstrated that brain regions that process sound act to filter out noise while retaining information about behaviorally important sounds, such that the neural representations of sound mixtures in central...
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Further Reading
The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319516608
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Malone, B. (2020). Auditory Cortex: Separating Signal from Noise. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_100687-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_100687-1
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