Auditory perception of breaking and bouncing events: A case study in ecological acoustics

Research in auditory perception has tended to emphasize the detection and processing of sound elements with quasi-stable spectral structure, such as tones, formants, and bursts of noise. In the spectral domain, these elements are distinguished by frequency peak or range, bandwidth, and amplitude. In the temporal domain, acoustic analysis has often focused on the durations of sound elements, the intervals and phase relations between them, and the influence of these on pitch and loudness perception, temporal acuity, masking, and localization. The auditory system has often been approached as an analyzer of essentially time-constant functions of frequency, amplitude, and duration, on the assumption that complex auditory percepts are compositions over sound elements having those properties, with certain temporal inter