For the ears, a cocktail party presents a chaotic scene: glasses clink, voices buzz, light piano music may waft down from the stage. A group of researchers at The John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., is trying to understand how the brain makes sense of such complex auditory environments. The team is testing how humans track sound patterns over time, and under what circumstances the brain registers that the pattern has been broken. The researchers will present preliminary findings at the Acoustics 2012 meeting in Hong Kong, May 13-18, a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Acoustical Society of China, Western Pacific Acoustics Conference, and the Hong Kong Institute of Acoustics.

‘When a person hears a sound, both what we call ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes occur in the brain,