Stemming from his appointment as the Randolph Rothschild Guest Composer at Peabody from 1992-1993, Roger Reynolds has written a series of essays that will take the reader into the mind of a practicing composer. This book will produce meaningful discourse on how composer actually work, instead of being hidden from the public eye. Understanding the condition of music in contemporary society requires insight into how composers conduct their work, and this book will facilitate musical understanding and will be of great interest to composers, theorists, cognitive and perceptual scientists as well as the music lover. Also includes 136 musical examples.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book contains the papers that were presented at the XIIIth International Symposium on Hearing (ISH), which was held in Dourdan, France, between August 24 and 29, 2003. From its first edition in 1969, the Symposium has had a distinguished tradition of bringing together auditory psychologists and physiologists. Hearing science now also includes computational modeling and brain imaging, and this is reflected in the papers collected. The rich interactions between participants during the meeting were yet another indication of the appositeness of the original idea to confront approaches around shared scientific issues. A total of 62 solicited papers are included, organized into 12 broad thematic areas ranging from cochlear signal processing to plasticity and perceptual learning. The themes follow the sessions and the chronological order of the paper presentations during the symposium. A notable feature of the ISH books is the transcription of the discussions between participants. A draft version of the book is circulated before the meeting, and all participants are invited to make written comments, before or during the presentations. This particularity is perhaps what makes the ISH book series so valuable as a truthful picture of the evolution of issues in hearing science. We tried to uphold this tradition, which was all the easier because of the excellent scientific content of the discussions.

This book contains the papers that were presented at the XIIIth International Symposium on Hearing (ISH), which was held in Dourdan, France, between August 24 and 29, 2003. From its first edition in 1969, the Symposium has had a distinguished tradition of bringing together auditory psychologists and physiologists. Hearing science now also includes computational modeling and brain imaging, and this is reflected in the papers collected. The rich interactions between participants during the meeting were yet another indication of the appositeness of the original idea to confront approaches around shared scientific issues. A total of 62 solicited papers are included, organized into 12 broad thematic areas ranging from cochlear signal processing to plasticity and perceptual learning. The themes follow the sessions and the chronological order of the paper presentations during the symposium. A notable feature of the ISH books is the transcription of the discussions between participants. A draft version of the book is circulated before the meeting, and all participants are invited to make written comments, before or during the presentations. This particularity is perhaps what makes the ISH book series so valuable as a truthful picture of the evolution of issues in hearing science. We tried to uphold this tradition, which was all the easier because of the excellent scientific content of the discussions.

Roughly defined as any property other than pitch, duration, and loudness that allows two sounds to be distinguished, timbre is a foundational aspect of hearing. The remarkable ability of humans to recognize sound sources and events (e.g., glass breaking, a friend's voice, a tone from a piano) stems primarily from a capacity to perceive and process differences in the timbre of sounds. Timbre raises many important issues in psychology and the cognitive sciences, musical acoustics, speech processing, medical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Current research on timbre perception unfolds along three main fronts: On the one hand, researchers explore the principal perceptual processes that orchestrate timbre processing, such as the structure of its perceptual representation, sound categorization and recognition, memory for timbre, and its ability to elicit rich semantic associations, as well as the underlying neural mechanisms. On the other hand, timbre is studied as part of specific scenarios, including the perception of the human voice, as a structuring force in music, as perceived with cochlear implants, and through its role in affecting sound quality and sound design. Finally, computational acoustic models are sought through prediction of psychophysical data, physiologically inspired representations, and audio analysis-synthesis techniques. Along these three scientific fronts, significant breakthroughs have been achieved during the last decade. This volume will be the first book dedicated to a comprehensive and authoritative presentation of timbre perception and cognition research and the acoustic modeling of timbre. The volume will serve as a natural complement to the SHAR volumes on the basic auditory parameters of Pitch edited by Plack, Oxenham, Popper, and Fay, and Loudness by Florentine, Popper, and Fay. Moreover, through the integration of complementary scientific methods ranging from signal processing to brain imaging, the book has the potential to leverage new interdisciplinary synergies in hearing science. For these reasons, the volume will be exceptionally valuable to various subfields of hearing science, including cognitive auditory neuroscience, psychoacoustics, music perception and cognition, but may even exert significant influence on fields such as musical acoustics, music information retrieval, and acoustic signal processing. It is expected that the volume will have broad appeal to psychologists, neuroscientists, and acousticians involved in research on auditory perception and cognition. Specifically, this book will have a strong impact on hearing researchers with interest in timbre and will serve as the key publication and up-to-date reference on timbre for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, as well as established scholars.

The realm of auditory cognition is beginning to affirm itself as a new research orientation. Until now, no volume has existed that covers in a didactic fashion the whole range of subjects in this domain. To rectify this situation a special tutorial workshop organized by the French Acoustical Society was held at IRCAM, the music research institute founded by Pierre Boulez. Specialists in perceptual organization, memory, attention, music psychology, neurospsychology, and developmental psychology were invited from Europe and North America. The chapters of this book present the materials from their lectures. The book will be useful to advanced students in the cognitive sciences and scientists specializing in many fields as well as in auditory psychology.