Auditory science or hearing science is a field of research and education concerning the perception of sounds by humans, animals, or machines. It is a heavily interdisciplinary field at the crossroad between acoustics, neuroscience, and psychology.^[1] It is often related to one or many of these other fields: psychophysics, psychoacoustics, audiology, physiology, otorhinolaryngology, speech science, automatic speech recognition, music psychology, linguistics, and psycholinguistics.

History

Early auditory research included the early 19th century work of Georg Ohm and August Seebeck and their experiments and arguments about Fourier analysis of sounds. Later in the 19th century, German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz wrote Sensations of Tone describing the founding concepts of psychoacoustics, i.e. the relationship between the physical parameters of a sound and the percept that it induces.

Psychoacoutics is primarily interested in the basic workings of the ear and is, therefore, mostly studied using simple sounds like pure tones. In the 1950s, psychologists George A. Miller and J. C. R. Licklider furthered our knowledge in psychoacoustics and speech perception.^[2][3]

Main scientific journals

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)
• Hearing Research
• Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (JARO)
• Ear and Hearing
• Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research
• Trends in Hearing
• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
• Cochlear Implants International
• Otology & Neurotology
• Audiology & Neurotology
• Acta Acustica united with Acustica
• Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
• International Journal of Audiology (IJA)
• Journal of the American Academy of Audiology (JAAA)
• Frontiers in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
• Acoustical Science and Technology
• Speech Communication
• Music Perception

Scientific associations and societies

International

• Acoustical Society of America
• Association for Research in Otolaryngology
• European Acoustics Association

National

• Société Française d'Acoustique (French Acoustical Society)
• Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik (German Acoustical Society)
• British Society of Audiology
• Nederlandse Vereniging voor Audiologie (Dutch Association for Audiology)
• Acoustical Society of Japan

Online resources

Many members of the auditory science community follow the auditory.org mailing list, known as "the Auditory List".