A Paradoxical Aspect of Auditory Change Detection

The auditory entities to which human listeners attach meaning are generally combinations of successive and spectrally different sounds rather than static acoustic features. Thus, an important task of the brain is to connect, or bind, successive sounds. When several sound sources are concomitantly active, the connections must of course be selective. It appears that connections are established on the basis of automatic rules, in particular a rule of spectral proximity (Bregman 1990). This can lead, for instance, to the perception of a melodic “motion” between successive tones mixed or interleaved with other tones.