Beschreibung:
<jats:p>The exceptional honor of this session gives me the opportunity to introduce some questions usually not discussed in conferences papers. My point of departure is that the function of our hearing is to inform us as reliably as possible about the world of sounds around us. It is the task of hearing research to find the laws involved. In carrying out this task, we are permanently confronted with several temptations. Their common origin is the scientific rule to keep the number of variables as small as possible. In this way, parts get more attention than structure. Hence, many essential aspects of everyday sounds had to wait surprisingly long before they got proper scientific attention. Some examples will be discussed under the following headings: (1) the temptation to study the perception of isolated sound elements such as single tones and vowels rather than the dynamic spectrotemporal patterns of connected speech; (2) the temptation to consider hearing primarily as ‘‘designed’’ for perceiving sounds from a single source rather than from two or more simultaneous sound sources; (3) the temptation to restrict our attention to the auditory parameters of sounds rather than including cognition as an essential complementary part of hearing.</jats:p>