William A. Yost and the Psychoacoustics of Human Sound Source Perception

Abstract

We think of our eyes as the primary channel through which we perceive the world, “seeing is believing,” but, in fact, most of our surroundings at any given moment are out of view. For much of the information about the world around us, we depend on our ears. We hear the approaching bus in the din of traffic and avoid stepping into the street; we hear a familiar voice in the clamor of the crowd and recognize an old friend; we hear music playing, glasses clinking, people laughing, a cocktail party is underway next door. Such seemingly simple acts of recognition are so automatic that we rarely give them any thought, but they are examples of an extraordinary ability to perceive the world through sound, unmatched in accuracy and scale by our most sophisticated machinerecognition systems (Szabo et al., 2016).