This webpage presents sound examples accompanying the manuscript Auditory scene analysis in music: a synthetic review. For listening to the examples, please click on the links in the figure captions. 

Musical scene analysis illustrated according to three examples. The top panel depicts a spectrogram of a musical excerpt, the middle panel corresponding musical notation, and the bottom panel a schematic of the ASA process in action. 

(A) Virtual polyphony: Pablo Casals playing a JS Bach cello suite (1 in G major, BWV 1007) with three different streams emerging from one instrument. 

(B) Blend: An excerpt of the piece Milestones played by the Miles Davis jazz quintet, providing a fused brass section. 

(C) Sound mass: Ligeti’s Athmosphere played by the Berlin Philharmonics yielding a sound mass.
 

Visual illustration of Gestalt principles as foundation of auditory scene analysis. Depending on their arrangement, the filled dots (analogical to energy pixels in a spectrogram along time and frequency) form different groups. 

(A) Proximity: An upper group and a lower group are formed due to spatial (or spectrotemporal) proximity. The example of virtual polyphony is based on pitch proximity. It is much used in Baroque style as in a Teleman Sonata (here, F major). 

(B) Similarity: Black and grey lines separate and form separate groups. A good example for this is the so-called Wessel illusion that illustrates pitch and timbre-based similarity and grouping. 

(C) Common fate: Roof-shaped components form one group and contrast with the straight line on top. The so-called McAdams-Reynolds illusion demonstrates the fusion of a vocal and instrumental sound as a function of micro-modulation. 

(D) Closure: a square is formed, despite missing information. In music, one may hear a stream of continuous notes, even though the stream is not continuous in reality. This occurs, for instance, in the piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra by Tárrega (example from Deutsch, 2019, Ox U Press, Ch. 3). 

(E) Good continuation: The trajectory of components is interpreted in the simplest form, yielding two crossing straight lines instead of two cornered lines. A good example of continuity is the “scale illusion” (example from Deutsch, 2019, Ox U Press, Ch. 3). , wherein two sources can play pitch sequences alternating between high and low, but the auditory system constructs two continuous sequence.