Page 41 - Spring2022

FEATURED ARTICLE
William A. Yost and the Psychoacoustics of Human Sound Source Perception
Robert A. Lutfi and Christopher A. Brown
We think of our eyes as the primary channel through which we perceive the world, “seeing is believing,” but, in fact, most of our surroundings at any given moment are out of view. For much of the information about the world around us, we depend on our ears. We hear the approaching bus in the din of traffic and avoid stepping into the street; we hear a familiar voice in the clamor of the crowd and recognize an old friend; we hear music playing, glasses clinking, people laughing, a cocktail party is underway next door. Such seemingly simple acts of recognition are so automatic that we rarely give them any thought, but they are examples of an extraordinary ability to perceive the world through sound, unmatched in accuracy and scale by our most sophisticated machine- recognition systems (Szabo et al., 2016).
William A. (Bill) Yost (shown with his family in Figure 1) is a hearing scientist who, for over half a century, has
been a leader in the effort to understand this extraordi- nary ability. As of writing this, Bill has published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles, 6 authored or coauthored books, and 50 book chapters on or related to the topic. The number of major scientific organizations giving their highest form of recognition to Bill’s work is too long to list here. You may know Bill from his many years of ser- vice to the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). He has held every elected office in the Society including president and was the recipient of the Society’s Gold Medal in 2018 (see https://asa.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1121/1.5036155). Among other important roles, he has served as presi- dent of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO); program director of the National Science Foun- dation: Sensory Physiology and Perception; chair of the National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences Committee on Hearing, Bioacoustics and Bio- mechanics (CHABA); and cochair of the Task Force on Developing the National Strategic Plan for the Establishment of the National Institute on Deafness
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https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2022.18.1.41
and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health. For more about Bill, see https://asa.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1121/1.5036155.
This article provides an overview of Bill’s research and, more broadly, the topic of human sound source per- ception. Readers wishing to delve more deeply into the subject can find review chapters of works by other promi- nent authors in one of Bill’s books, Auditory Perception of Sound Sources (Yost et al., 2008).
Impossible Sound Source Perception
Before talking about Bill’s research, it is first necessary to get a sense of why human sound source perception is so remarkable. Bill tells his students the reason is “because it’s impossible.” As provocative as this answer might seem, it is not far from the truth. We have many examples to choose from; sound source perception can involve some- thing as simple as recognizing the “ping” of a tuning fork or as complex as parsing an entire “auditory scene” (imagine any busy street in downtown Chicago). Let’s
Figure 1. Bill Yost on an Alaskan cruise with his family celebrating his 50th anniversary. Left to right: daughter
Alyson, Bill, wife Lee, and daughter Kelly.
Volume 18, issue 1 | Spring 2022 • Acoustics Today 41