Auditory science or hearing science is a field of research and education concerning the perception of sounds by humans, animals, or machines. It is a heavily interdisciplinary field at the crossroad between

acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...

, and

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

. It is often related to one or many of these other fields:

psychophysics Psychophysics is the field of psychology which quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimulus (physiology), stimuli and the sensation (psychology), sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described ...

psychoacoustics Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of the perception of sound by the human auditory system. It is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated with sound including noise, speech, ...

audiology Audiology (from Latin 'to hear'; and from Ancient Greek, Greek branch of learning , ''wikt:-logia, -logia'') is a branch of science that studies hearing, balance, and related disorders. Audiologists treat those with hearing loss and proactivel ...

physiology Physiology (; ) is the science, scientific study of function (biology), functions and mechanism (biology), mechanisms in a life, living system. As a branches of science, subdiscipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ syst ...

otorhinolaryngology Otorhinolaryngology ( , abbreviated ORL and also known as otolaryngology, otolaryngology–head and neck surgery (ORL–H&N or OHNS), or ear, nose, and throat (ENT)) is a surgical subspecialty within medicine that deals with the surgical an ...

speech science Speech science refers to the study of production, transmission and perception of speech. Speech science involves anatomy, in particular the anatomy of the oro-facial region and neuroanatomy, physiology, and acoustics. Speech production The pro ...

automatic speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also k ...

music psychology The psychology of music, or music psychology, is a branch of psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and/or musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is pe ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, and

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

History

Early auditory research included the early 19th century work of

Georg Ohm Georg Simon Ohm (; ; 16 March 1789 – 6 July 1854) was a German mathematician and physicist. As a school teacher, Ohm began his research with the new electrochemical cell, invented by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his o ...

and August Seebeck and their experiments and arguments about

Fourier analysis In mathematics, Fourier analysis () is the study of the way general functions may be represented or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. Fourier analysis grew from the study of Fourier series, and is named after Joseph Fo ...

of sounds. Later in the 19th century, German physicist

Hermann von Helmholtz Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (; ; 31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894; "von" since 1883) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The ...

wrote '' Sensations of Tone'' describing the founding concepts of psychoacoustics, i.e. the relationship between the physical parameters of a

sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the br ...

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 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...

furthered our knowledge in psychoacoustics and speech perception.

Main scientific journals

Acoustical Science and Technology

Acta Acustica united with Acustica

Audiology & Neurotology

Cochlear Implants International

Ear and Hearing

Frontiers in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
*

Hearing Research The ''Hearing Research'' is a peer-reviewed monthly journal that publishes research work with basic peripheral and central auditory mechanisms. Indexing and abstracting According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2017 impact ...

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
* International Journal of Audiology (IJA)
Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research

Journal of the American Academy of Audiology
(JAAA)
Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology
(JARO)
Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
* Music Perception
Otology & Neurotology

Speech Communication
* The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)
Trends in Hearing

Scientific associations and societies

International

* International Society of Audiology *

Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary org ...

* 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 th
auditory.org
mailing list, known as "the Auditory List". Global Audiology offers information on the practice of Audiology around the world and is maintained by the International Society of Audiology.

References

Hearing {{sci-stub