Auditory science or
hearing science is a field of research and education concerning the
Hearing by humans, animals, or machines. It is a heavily interdisciplinary field at the crossroad between
acoustics,
neuroscience, and
psychology.
It is often related to one or many of these other fields:
psychophysics,
psychoacoustics,
audiology,
physiology, otorhinolaryngology,
speech science, automatic speech recognition,
music psychology,
linguistics, and psycholinguistics.
History
Early auditory research included the early 19th century work of
Georg Ohm and
August Seebeck and their experiments and arguments about
Fourier analysis of sounds. Later in the 19th century, German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz wrote
Sensations of Tone describing the founding concepts of psychoacoustics, i.e. the relationship between the physical parameters of a
sound and the percept that it induces.
Psychoacoutics is primarily interested in the basic workings of the ear and is, therefore, mostly studied using simple sounds like pure tones. In the 1950s, psychologists George A. Miller and J. C. R. Licklider furthered our knowledge in psychoacoustics and speech perception.
Main scientific journals
Scientific associations and societies
International
-
International Society of Audiology
-
Acoustical Society of America
-
Association for Research in Otolaryngology
-
European Acoustics Association
-
Nordic Audiological Society
National
-
Société Française d'Acoustique (French Acoustical Society)
-
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik (German Acoustical Society)
-
British Society of Audiology
-
Nederlandse Vereniging voor Audiologie (Dutch Association for Audiology)
-
Acoustical Society of Japan
Online resources
Many members of the auditory science community follow the
auditory.org mailing list, known as "the Auditory List".
offers information on the practice of Audiology around the world and is maintained by the International Society of Audiology.
