(Pierre Divenyi)

Subject: 
From:    Pierre Divenyi <marva4!pdivenyi(at)ucdavis.edu >
Date:    Tue, 8 Dec 92 15:24:55 PST

Dan Ellis's message is very thought-provoking. I wish that those
of us interested could have a little glimpse at the algorithms
Dan and David Huron (and others?) have been playing with and
later discarded. Even failures are revealing, often more so
than successes.

Re/ the acoustic/auditory stream debate: It is without
question that there ARE acoustic streams -- because there
ARE multiple sources that decided to become active all
at the same time and create a hell of an acoustic mess...
This mess can be broken up (heuristically) into components
using several methods. When we say "auditory", we
refer to the method the human listener employs and we
know that he is fairly successful. Now, there could be
algorithms arriving at a similar success rate, using
schemes conceivably very different from what, according
to our investigations and speculations, human listeners
use. Thus, "auditory stream" designates one solution
to the problem of breaking up the acoustic scene into
acoustic streams. Our attempts to either cast the
listener's auditory-stream strategy into algorithms,
or to design our own, also contribute to the enrichment
of our vocabulary of scene analysis, of which we
are intimately familiar only with the "auditory" family --
and even that only through experience (because we
have not been able, as of yet, to formally describe this
experience).

Lots of luck to Dan, David Huron, and all of us -- it's an
interesting game!
	
	Pierre Divenyi