Binding the Acoustic Features of an Auditory Source through Temporal Coherence

Numerous studies have suggested that the perception of a target sound stream (or source) can only be segregated from a complex acoustic background mixture if the acoustic features underlying its perceptual attributes (e.g., pitch, location, and timbre) induce temporally modulated responses that are mutually correlated (or coherent), and that are uncorrelated (incoherent) from those of other sources in the mixture. This “temporal coherence” hypothesis asserts that attentive listening to one acoustic feature of a target enhances brain responses to that feature but would also concomitantly (1) induce mutually excitatory influences with other coherently responding neurons, thus enhancing (or binding) them all as they respond to the attended source; by contrast, (2) suppressive interactions are hypothesized to build up among neurons driven by temporally incoherent sound features, thus relatively reducing their activity. In this study, we report on EEG measurements in human subjects engaged in various sound segregation tasks that demonstrate rapid binding among the temporally coherent features of the attended source regardless of their identity (pure tone components, tone complexes, or noise), harmonic relationship, or frequency separation, thus confirming the key role temporal coherence plays in the analysis and organization of auditory scenes.