ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Statistics of natural reverberation enable perceptual separation of sound and space.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- From sound to source: Human and model recognition of environmental sounds.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Effects of reverberation and binaural sensitivity on spatial release from masking.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025Article
- Ideal-observer model of human sound localization of sources with unknown spectrum.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Noise schemas aid hearing in noise.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Sensory and Perceptual Decisional Processes Underlying the Perception of Reverberant Auditory Environments.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Noises on-How the Brain Deals with Acoustic Noise.Biology · 2024Review
- Original speech and its echo are segregated and separately processed in the human brain.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- On the value of diverse organisms in auditory research: From fish to flies to humans.Hearing research · 2023Review
- Article
- Adaptation in auditory processing.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Robust Vocal Quality Feature Embeddings for Dysphonic Voice Detection.IEEE/ACM transactions on audio, speech, and language processing · 2023Article
- Effects of Data Augmentations on Speech Emotion Recognition.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Cortical adaptation to sound reverberation.eLife · 2022Article
- Human cortical processing of interaural coherence.iScience · 2022Article
- FORUM: Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Article
- Deep neural network models of sound localization reveal how perception is adapted to real-world environments.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Review
- Auditory Brainstem Models: Adapting Cochlear Nuclei Improve Spatial Encoding by the Medial Superior Olive in Reverberation.Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO · 2021Article
- Listening in complex acoustic scenes.Current opinion in physiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In everyday listening, sound reaches our ears directly from a source as well as indirectly via reflections known as reverberation. Reverberation profoundly distorts the sound from a source, yet humans can both identify sound sources and distinguish environments from the resulting sound, via mechanisms that remain unclear. The core computational challenge is that the acoustic signatures of the source and environment are combined in a single signal received by the ear. Here we ask whether our recognition of sound sources and spaces reflects an ability to separate their effects and whether any such separation is enabled by statistical regularities of real-world reverberation. To first determine whether such statistical regularities exist, we measured impulse responses (IRs) of 271 spaces sampled from the distribution encountered by humans during daily life. The sampled spaces were diverse, but their IRs were tightly constrained, exhibiting exponential decay at frequency-dependent rates: Mid frequencies reverberated longest whereas higher and lower frequencies decayed more rapidly, presumably due to absorptive properties of materials and air. To test whether humans leverage these regularities, we manipulated IR decay characteristics in simulated reverberant audio. Listeners could discriminate sound sources and environments from these signals, but their abilities degraded when reverberation characteristics deviated from those of real-world environments. Subjectively, atypical IRs were mistaken for sound sources. The results suggest the brain separates sound into contributions from the source and the environment, constrained by a prior on natural reverberation. This separation process may contribute to robust recognition while providing information about spaces around us.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.