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Auditory scene analysis (ASA) is a complex process the auditory system has to perform in order to assign sensory information to mental entities coresponding to acoustic events. Here are some examples of the complexity of ASA.
The above examples indicate that the transformation of visual to auditory external representations cannot be based on a surface mapping between their physical dimensions. For example, mapping time to the x-axis, frequency to the y-axis and intensity to color results to a visual representation (a spectrogram) that is hardly informative (if at all) about the actual sound represented.
The culprit is the auditory organisation process of the auditory system, which transforms the raw sensory material to a structured description of mental entities (streams). Our understanding of sounds (that is to say, how sounds are assigned to the events that have caused them) relies heavily on this structural organisation.
The Aditory Display designer has to take into acount this structural organisation, because it will be always imposed by the auditory system. This is especially true with fast rates of presentation which 'activate' several auditory gestalts. It is all very easy to take advantage of these to design auditory illusions.
If you are interested in Auditory Perception and Auditory Scene Analysis, I would strongly suggest to have a look at Auditory Perception: Demonstrations and Experiments, for a starter. Have fun...
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