Introduction to the special issue on ecological perspectives on hearing

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This special issue explores an ecological perspective to hearing in human and non-human animals. The goal is to understand the relationship between the auditory system and the natural sounds of real-world environments, including animal vocalizations such as birdsongs or insect stridulations and geophysical sounds such as stream, wind, or rainfall sounds. Furthering this understanding requires drawing insights from evolution, behavior, acoustics, modeling, and more. The articles in this issue span diverse disciplines such as evolutionary biology, soundscape ecology and ecoacoustics, neuro-ethology and bioacoustics, computational acoustics, psychoacoustics, machine learning, clinical audiology, and physiology. Collectively, the articles in this joint issue with JASA and JASA Express Letters demonstrate how this interdisciplinary approach to hearing can advance our understanding of auditory monitoring and comprehension of natural sounds and scenes.