Auditory Gestalt Rules and Their Application

The formation of auditory objectsAuditoryobjects is of high interest for both the understanding of human hearing as well as for computer-based analysis of sound signals. Breaking down an acoustic sceneAcoustic scene into meaningful units facilitates the segregationSegregation and recognition of sound-sources from a mixture. These are abilities that are particularly challenging for machine listeningMachine listening as well as for hearing-impaired listeners.Hearing Hearingimpaired-listeners An early approach to explaining object perception in the visual domain was made by the GestaltGestalt psychologists. They aimed at setting up specific rules according to which sensory input is grouped into either one coherent or multiple separate objects. Inspired by these Gestalt RulesGestaltrules and by exploiting physical and perceptual properties of sounds, different algorithms have been designed to segregate sound mixtures into auditory objects. This chapter reviews some literature on such algorithms and the underlying principles of auditory object formation with a special focus on the connection between perceptual findings and their technical implementation.