Re: streams and groups

["John K. Bates" <jkbates@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Al and List,
   (I wrote this before I read your more recent post but I'm sending it
anyway.  A little redundancy can't hurt.)
   In the few times that I have given talks before an audience, a few
perplexed but polite people might applaud my presentation.  Since there are
so few, I am able easily to identify the individual streams of hand claps
from the sources scattered among the audience.
   As I understand the discussion here, each clap in a clapper's stream of
claps could be considered to be a group.  Or is it that each clapper's
stream of claps is a group?  In any case, further parsing of my applause
would reveal that every individual clap is itself composed of streams
and/or groups of smaller identifiable transient events.
   But when you, Al, finish a presentation, the audience explodes with an
ovation that is a flow of hundreds of homogenized hand-clap sources.  You
can no longer pick out the streams and groups.  The applause you get is a
single amorphous spatially distributed stream of noise.  What happened to
the groups?  And is it important to know this?

   John Bates
  Pleasantville, New York

At 10:31 PM 05/10/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi Tony and List,
>
>I know what a stream is -- a time-varying sound or sequence of
>sounds, treated by the auditory system as coming from a single
>sound source.  However, I don't know what is meant by a group.
>Perhaps the context  in which this term was found would be
>informative.  How was it used in the original source?
>
>Best,
>
>Al
>-------------------------------------------------
>Albert S. Bregman, Emeritus Professor
>Dept of Psychology, McGill University
>1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue
>Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 1B1
>
>Office:
>     Phone:  +1 (514) 398-6103
>     Fax: +1 (514) 398-4896
>Home:
>     Phone & Fax: +1 (514) 484-2592
>Email:
>     bregman@psych.mcgill.ca