Sound or auditory attention is the ability of human perception to focus on a certain sound in the presence of other distracting sounds.
Mari Riess Jones and William Yee in their work Listening to auditory events: the role of temporary organization (1993) established something obvious: you can not perceive, understand or remember a sound if you do not pay attention.
The New Zealander composer Denis Smalley in his book Listening imaginatively, Listening in the electroacoustic age (1992), discriminates two clearly differentiated tasks: Listening and hearing. Hearing involves an involuntary act, while listening involves an intentional act, a willingness to learn from sound.
Barry Truax in his work Acoustic Communication (2001) proposes the term background listening (background listening) to differentiate a different level of hearing that occurs when a person "hears" a sound that is present, but does not "hear" it , does not pay attention even knowing that it is there.
Marshall McLuhan in his theory of perception states that the sound image needs to be strengthened by other senses. Not because the sound image is weak, but because human perception has great dependence on visual perception and the sense of hearing needs that sight confirm what you have perceived.
wiki
