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 disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...

, and

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

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

psychophysics Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, m ...

psychoacoustics Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of sound perception and audiology—how humans perceive various sounds. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated wit ...

audiology Audiology (from Latin , "to hear"; and from Greek , ''-logia'') is a branch of science that studies hearing, balance, and related disorders. Audiologists treat those with hearing loss and proactively prevent related damage. By employing various ...

physiology Physiology (; ) is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a sub-discipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical ...

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 subspeciality within medicine that deals with the surgical a ...

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 with the m ...

music psychology Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, r ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, 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 physicist and mathematician. 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 August Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm Seebeck (27 December 1805 in Jena – 19 March 1849 in Dresden) was a scientist at the Technische Universität Dresden. Seebeck is primarily remembered for his work on sound and hearing, in particular with experim ...

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 Josep ...

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

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

wrote ''

Sensations of Tone ''On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music'' (German ), commonly referred to as ''Sensations of Tone'', is a foundational work on music acoustics and the perception of sound by Hermann von Helmholtz. The first G ...

'' 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 ...

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 The ''International Journal of Audiology'' is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering research in audiology, including psychoacoustics, anatomy, physiology, cellular and molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience, speech and hearing scien ...

(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 ''Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by University of California Press five times a year. It was founded by Diana Deutsch. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has ...

Otology & Neurotology

Speech Communication
*

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America The ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of acoustics. It is published by the Acoustical Society of America and the editor-in-chief is James F. Lynch (Woods Hole Oceanog ...

(JASA)
Trends in Hearing

Scientific associations and societies

International

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 orga ...

Association for Research in Otolaryngology The Association for Research in Otolaryngology is a professional association of researchers, including practitioners, teachers, and students, in the fields of otolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat), and especially including hearing. Journal JARO ...

* European Acoustics Association

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".

References

Hearing {{sci-stub