Albert Bregman

Albert Stanley Bregman (September 15, 1936 – May 18, 2023) was a Canadian academic and researcher in experimental psychology, cognitive science, and Gestalt psychology, primarily in the perceptual organization of sound.

Bregman was born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on September 15, 1936.

His father was an office manager and his mother, a home-maker.

He had one sister, who lives in Jerusalem, Israel.

His wife is a retired history professor and active artist.

He had three stepdaughters and two stepsons.

Bregman died on May 18, 2023, at the age of 86.

Bregman received a Bachelor of Arts degree from University College of the University of Toronto, with a concentration in Philosophy (ethics), in 1957.

He received a master's degree in Psychology, also from the University of Toronto, in 1959, after which he worked as a research assistant for two summers for Endel Tulving, studying how subjective organization affected the process of memorization.

However, after Hovland died in 1961, he did his dissertation research on human memory, supervised by Fred D. Sheffield.

From 1962 to 1965, he was a research fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies established by George A. Miller and Jerome S. Bruner at Harvard University, where he continued to study memory.

There, he and Donald A. Norman set up one of the earliest computer systems for controlling psychological experiments, based on a PDP-4 computer.

He also taught two courses in the Harvard Psychology Department.

One was the laboratory section of a course in experimental psychology, taught by Richard Herrnstein; the other was a graduate seminar in learning theory.

In 1963, he received a PhD degree from Yale University, where he had gone, in 1959, to study the formation of concepts with Carl I. Hovland.

Arriving at McGill in 1965, he became the first professor there to teach cognitive psychology.

He also taught courses on Computer and Man, Research methods in experimental psychology, Learning Theory, Auditory Perception, Psychological Theory, and honors research seminars.

Many of Bregman's McGill undergraduate students have gone on to make significant contributions to intellectual life.

These include Steven Pinker, Adam Gopnik, Paul Bloom, Stevan Harnad, Alfonso Caramazza, Marcel Just, Stephen McAdams, Bruce Walker, Susan Pinker, Alexander I. Rudnicky, and Alison Gopnik.

His graduate students have included, among others, Gary L. Dannenbring, Valter Ciocca, Howard Steiger, Martine Turgeon, Poppy A.C. Crum, Michael Mills (Communications), James K. Wright (Music), and Francesco Tordini (Electrical Engineering).

Postdoctoral fellows in his laboratory have included Richard Parncutt, Sheila Williams, and Brian Roberts.

Bregman arrived at McGill University in 1965 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, rose to the rank of full professor, and in 1999 received a lifetime post-retirement appointment in the Psychology Department at the rank of emeritus professor.

He spent sabbatical periods at Cornell University, the University of Sussex, and at Stanford University, where he was associated with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), founded by John Chowning.

He gave invited lectures on auditory scene analysis at many universities, including Harvard, MIT, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Cornell, Virginia, Toronto, Hong Kong, ETH Zürich, Oldenburg, Thessaloniki, and the New University of Lisbon, as well as at research institutes including Advanced Technology Research (ATR) in Kyoto, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Tokyo, the Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project in Tokyo, and Dolby Labs in San Francisco.

Bregman's first research at McGill was a continuation of his earlier research on memory.

However, in 1969, while preparing a recording of a rapid succession of sounds for an experiment on learning, he made a fortuitous discovery.

"I was preparing an experiment on learning, involving a rapid sequence of unrelated sounds, each about the length of a speech phoneme. I spliced together one-tenth-second segments of many different sounds – water splashing in a sink, a dentist's drill, a tone, a vowel, etc. When I played the tape back to myself, though, I did not experience the sequences in the order that they were recorded on the tape. It appeared that non-adjacent sounds were grouping together and appeared to be adjacent. It was the similar sounds that seemed to be forming integrated perceptual sequences. This reminded me of an essay I had written at the University of Toronto on the topic of Gestalt Psychology. Some of the Gestaltist's examples showed that similar visual forms would group together and segregate from dissimilar ones. Perhaps an analogous sort of grouping might be happening in my auditory sequence. Although I had never been trained in auditory perception research, this one subjective experience set me off on a 36-year period of study.'"

To support this research, he developed a computer-based laboratory based on a PDP-11 computer for working with auditory and visual signals and testing human subjects.

Laboratory supervisors included Gary Bernstein, Gary Dannenbring, Philippe Grall, Sharif Qureshi, and Pierre Abdel Ahad.

Bregman developed the concept of auditory stream segregation (also called "streaming") to describe how a single sequence of sounds could be interpreted by the auditory system as two or more concurrent streams of sound.

Extensive research by Bregman and his students and postdoctoral fellows exposed many of the acoustic variables that controlled this process.

Eventually he came to think of streaming as a part of a larger auditory process, which he called "auditory scene analysis" (ASA), a process responsible for analyzing the complex mixture of sound that reaches the listener's ears and for building distinct perceptual representations of the individual acoustic sources that were buried in the mixture.

Bregman's work on ASA had influences outside the field of experimental psychology.

In a field called Computational auditory scene analysis (CASA), the principles of ASA have been used in the development of computer systems that carry out ASA automatically, for example segregating speech from other concurrent sounds.

The principles have been applied to music to explain the segregation and integration of musical sounds and have also been applied to speech perception ASA has been found in human newborns and in non-human animals, suggesting an innate basis for the process.

Bregman was known for having defined and conceptually organized the field of auditory scene analysis (ASA) in his 1990 book, Auditory Scene Analysis: the perceptual Organization of Sound (MIT Press).

His ideas about ASA have provided a new framework for research in the auditory systems of both humans and non-human animals, for behavioral and neurological studies of speech perception, for music theory, hearing aids, audio technology, and the separation of speech from other sounds by computers (CASA).

In acknowledgement of these contributions, he was called "the father of auditory scene analysis".

Until his death, Bregman held a post-retirement appointment at the rank of emeritus professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill University.

In 1992, Bregman set up an electronic mail list, AUDITORY, on the topic of auditory perception.