Auditory streaming is cumulative.
The auditory system appears to begin listening to an input with a basis 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 substreams. Several seconds of silence or of unpatterned noise slowly remove the bias of the mechanism in favor of these streams. The 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 packaged between recurrent "separators" (periods of silence or of white noise) and in the lengths of these separators.
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D010897:Pitch Discrimination