Page 58 - Fall2021

DAVID M. GREEN
paradigms that were subsequently developed, increased the understanding of the processes involved in auditory scene analysis.
End of an Era?
Dave continued to study profile analysis, spectral shape discrimination, and many other topics well after the publi- cation of Profile Analysis: Auditory Intensity Discrimination (Green, 1988). Dave retired as the field of psychological acoustics was changing. From the time of Fechner to the development of auditory scene analysis, a great deal of the study of psychological acoustics was strictly psycho- acoustical, where studies focused on the direct functional relationship between acoustic variables and performance measures of detection, discrimination, and identification. SDT provided quantifiable performance measures (e.g., PA), and ideal observer theory is a quantifiable means of obtaining psychophysical functional relationships between a performance measure and an acoustical variable.
Today, however, the questions often being asked in the field of psychological acoustics have moved beyond psy- choacoustics as it was studied by Dave and his students, postdocs, and colleagues. For instance, many current psychological acoustic studies involve independent vari- ables other than just acoustic parameters such as the age, gender, hearing ability, musical experience, species, or other characteristics of the subjects. In some sense, the strict study of psychoacoustics began with Fechner and began to end when Dave retired. There is much more to learn about auditory perception, but it is likely that the new knowledge will not be strictly psychoacoustical.
Throughout Dave’s career, he worked with many students, postdocs, and colleagues. This ever-so-brief mention of just a few of Dave’s numerous contributions probably indicates that his story may be longer and more conse- quential than most. However, to paraphrase Swets, many who passed through his lab had their own stories to tell, and after a few years of Dave’s tutelage, they were in an excellent position to tell them.
References
Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Orga- nization of Sound. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Egan, J. P. (1975). Signal Detection Theory and ROC Analysis. Aca- demic Press, New York, NY.
Fechner, G. T. (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik, Breitkopf und Hartel, Leipzig, Germany.
Green, D. M. (1958). Detection of multiple component signals in noise, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 30, 904-911.
Green, D. M. (1960). Psychoacoustics and detection theory, The Jour- nal of the Acoustical Society of America 32, 1189-1203.
Green, D. M. (1964). Psychoacoustics and detection theory. In J. A. Swets (Ed.), Signal Detection and Recognition by Human Observers, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. New York, NY.
Green, D. M. (1988). Profile Analysis: Auditory Intensity Discrimina- tion. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Green, D. M. (2020). A homily on signal detection theory. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 148, 222-225.
Green, D. M., and Mason, C. R. (1985). Auditory profile analysis: Frequency, phase, and Weber’s Law. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 77, 1155-1161.
Green, D. M., and Swets, J. A. (1966). Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, NY. (Reprinted by R. E. Krieger, Huntington, NY, 1974; Peninsula Publishing, Los Altos Hills, CA, 1988.)
Norman, D. A., Phelps, R., and Wightman, F. (1971). Some observa- tions on underwater hearing. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 50, 544-548.
Swets, J. A. (1964). Signal Detection and Recognition by Human Observers, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, NY.
Swets, J. A. (2010). Tulips to Thresholds: Counterpart Careers of the Author and Signal Detection, Peninsula Publishing, Los Altos Hills, CA.
Watson, C. S. (2005). Some comments on informational masking. Acta Acustica united with Acustica 91, 502-512.
About the Authors
William A. Yost
william.yost@asu.edu
Spatial Hearing Laboratory College of Health Solutions Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA
William A. (Bill) Yost is research pro- fessor at Arizona State University, Tempe, and director of the Spatial Hearing Laboratory. His current research inter- ests are sound source localization when listeners and/or the sound sources move and then measuring the size of the auditory scene. Bill received the Acoustical Society of
America (ASA) Silver Medal in Psychological and Physi- ological Acoustics and the ASA Gold Medal and is a past ASA president. He is funded by the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and Facebook Reality Labs. Bill was a National Science Founda- tion (NSF) postdoctoral fellow with David Green from 1970 to 1971 at the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla.
58 Acoustics Today • Fall 2021