Auditory science


Auditory science or hearing science is a field of research and education concerning the perception of sounds by humans, animals, or machines. It is a heavily interdisciplinary field at the crossroad between acoustics, neuroscience, and psychology. It is often related to one or many of these other fields: psychophysics, psychoacoustics, audiology, physiology, otorhinolaryngology, speech science, automatic speech recognition, music psychology, linguistics, and psycholinguistics.

History

Early auditory research included the early 19th century work of Georg Ohm and August Seebeck and their experiments and arguments about Fourier analysis of sounds. Later in the 19th century, German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz wrote Sensations of Tone describing the founding concepts of psychoacoustics, i.e. the relationship between the physical parameters of a sound and the percept that it induces.
Psychoacoutics is primarily interested in the basic workings of the ear and is, therefore, mostly studied using simple sounds like pure tones. In the 1950s, psychologists George A. Miller and J. C. R. Licklider furthered our knowledge in psychoacoustics and speech perception.

Main scientific journals

International

Many members of the auditory science community follow the mailing list, known as "the Auditory List".