Topic: naturalistic sounds

Listening in the real world involves making sense of mixtures of multiple overlapping sounds. The brain decomposes such scenes into individual objects, and a sequence of related auditory objects forms a stream. We are investigating the role of the auditory cortex in the formation and maintenance of auditory streams. The temporal coherence theory has provided one explanation for stream formation, postulating that the brain creates a multidimensional representation of sounds along different feature axes, and groups them based on their temporal coherence, to form streams. However, this theory has