The kicker is that he’s blind.

http://www.netherrealm.com/news/203

Its a little old, but I thought it was worth sharing. Cuz, ya know… listening.

Fantastic! We’ll post it sometime this week to direct people towards it.

Thanks for the suggestions, Aner. I’ll pass them around to the rest of the contributing editors, in case anyone has the inclination to pursue one of these.

I have a copy of that book myself, Diego. Considering its scope, I think writing up a brief is going to be pretty hard to do…especially since much of it is an analysis of psychoacoustic experiments. I’d also argue that his book may be less applicable to this month’s particular theme, as Auditory Scene Analysis (as function of the brain…not just the book title), is more about the factors that help us discriminate one sound from another…mostly at the subconscious level. Related, certainly, but a bit of a tangent. Have no fear though, Psychoacoustics is on our list of potential future topics. One of these days, we’ll focus in on that.

Attention driven ear brain interaction is what describes listening.

Psichoacoustic research is an actively growing field.

Not being a scientist I had been able to approach some interesting concepts from Albert Bregman’s book “Auditory scene analysis”.

He has developed an interesting theory on some aspects of auditory perception.

“Auditory scene” is for example one of his concepts.

I would like to bring the designing sound community a brief of his book in an article but I am not sure I can fulfill the task.

I hope you find the reference useful.

Best

Diego

I follow your blog eagerly every day, but I’m no good enough to contribute with articles. Anyway I may I would like to suggest a couple of post regarding Listen and Spatial. BTW they happen to be my latest fav topics and I can’t wait to read about them in the following months.

Listen: last night I read an in depth article on the never ending “audiophile issues”. He clarifies everything about it, but still it could be a good topic of discussion: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Listen: on the difference between hearing and listening, but also about “sentient listening”. E.g: “ear cleaning” (as per Schafer) and “careful/critical listening” (as in knowing what you are listening to, under a (e.g.) technical and theoretical POV). On this topic I’ve contacted a friend of mine, and asked him if he can contribute.

Spatial: when watching Utopia (a TV series from Channel 4, UK), I was flabbergasted by the soundtrack. The composition, the spatialisation and the integration into the scenes are amazing. So I’ve started reading about Spatial Sound/Music (on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_music ), and delving deeper into Ambisonics (something I would like to get into since a couple years but it’s so expensive). Of all the “surround” technologies, Ambisonics, it’s the one that offer the most possibilities, even at first order, with only 4 channels.

So I’ve started listening to spatialised music (especially Natasha Barrett’s works). Now (merging the two topics), when I listen to something “only stereo” it feels like jurassic. My ears (and my brain), my taste and my listening, now pretend that quality.

Ambisonics: it would be great to know if anyone here has bought and used the Brahma ambisonics mic. I found the cheapest setup in Brahma, Zoom H6 but I’m not convinced by it. It certainly could serve me well (and anyone with no budget) to start working with Ambisonics. Topic for an article?

Best,