Auditory streaming is cumulative.

Abstract
The auditory system appears to begin listening to an input with a bias toward hearing the input as a single stream, but it gradually accumulates evidence over a period of seconds which may lead to the input's being split into sub- streams. Several seconds of silence or of unpatterned noise slowly remove the bias of the mechanism in favor of these streams. These effects were demonstrated in experiments in which young adult listeners sped up sequences of tones until they split. The sequences varied in the number of tones pack- aged between recurrent "separators" (periods of silence or of white noise) and in the lengths of these separators. If a sequence of tones of different pitches is played rapidly enough, it seems to split perceptually into two or more concurrent substreams. Subgroups of tones closely re- lated in frequency, or following a smooth trajectory in frequency, will form part of the same stream. The splitting increases when the subgroups are farther away in frequency or when the sequence is played faster (Breg- man & Campbell, 1971; Heise & Miller, 1951; Miller & Heise, 1950; Van Noorden, Note 1). The splitting phenomenon may also be observed with repeating short cycles of speech sounds (Cole & Scott, 1973; Dorman, Cutting, & Raphael, 1975; Lackner & Gold- stein, 1974). These effects are seen by the author (Bregman, 1978b; Bregman & Dannenbring, in press) as the product of an auditory "parsing" mechanism. In natural environ- ments, the sounds emitted by different sources reach our ears, mixed together. The auditory system must group the acoustic

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