Page 7 - Volume 12, Issue 2 - Spring 2012

FROM THE EDITOR
Dick Stern
Acoustical Society of America Melville, New York 11747
This issue of Acoustics Today will be one of our largest. It contains six articles organized and submitted by our Guest Editor, Brenda Lonsbury-Martin, and one contributed by Hsuan-hsiu Annie Chen and Peter Narins. Thank you Brenda for doing a fine job and thank you to all the authors.
See you in Kansas City.
FROM THE GUEST EDITOR
Brenda Lonsbury-Martin
In this issue of Acoustics Today, sever- al authors from the fields of psychological and physiological acoustics present a cap- sule of the research in their specialized areas of interest.
Douglas H. Keefe from Boys Town National Research Hospital begins with a discussion of how the hearing process orig- inates at the level of the ear canal and mid- dle ear. He and his colleagues have used wideband acoustical measurements in the ear canal to contribute towards the identifi- cation of hearing loss in both infants and adults. Ruth Y. Litovsky from the University of Wisconsin Waisman Center goes on to address how the auditory system functions in a ‘cocktail party’ environment filled with
a disarray of noises. She explains that the auditory system’s ability to permit a spatial release from masking allows listeners to adequately separate speech from noise. Fan-Gang Zeng, from the University of California–Irvine, continues by dis-
The Acoustical Society of America’s
Technical Committee on Psychological
and Physiological Acoustics interconnects
researchers from the fields of psy-
chophysics and physiology of the auditory
system, along with modelers using a sys-
tems approach that is based on neural
structures in the auditory system and hear-
ing behavior. Bringing together the scien-
tists from these fields allows for better
insight into the processing mechanisms in
the auditory system and their perceptual
consequences. Physiological studies pro-
vide evidence whether a certain encoding
mechanism in the auditory system offers a
sufficient explanation for a perceptual phe-
nomenon. Understanding the physiologi-
cal mechanisms underlying auditory perception will not only have its own merits, but may advance developments in the diagnosis and technological treatment of hearing problems through hearing aids and cochlear implants.
6 Acoustics Today, April 2012