An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, Fourth Edition

Dealing with the topic of auditory perception, or psychoacoustics, this text emphasizes the mechanisms underlying auditory perception and explains the key concepts, including: loudness perception and intensity discrimination; frequency analysis and masking; temporal processing; the perception of pitch; and sound localization and related phenomena. Introductory chapters describe the basic physical concepts needed to understand the nature of auditory stimuli and the physiology of the auditory system and particularly the inner ear. Later chapters cover auditory object perception, and discuss the auditory system's ability to analyze a complex mixture of sounds in order to derive percepts corresponding to the individual sound source. Also covered are speech perception; practical applications such as hearing aids and cochlea implants, the psychoacoustics of high-fidelity sound reproduction, and concert hall acoustics.