Drawing on parallel experience and interest in both electronic reconnaissance and auditory perception I have taken a new approach to acoustic signal processing by merging their similarities in ability to interpret complex signal environments. This system extracts meaning from the acoustic waveform by treating the acoustic waveform, not as an entity, but with each individual halfwave as an elementary source of information having dimensions of energy, space, and time, called the Waveform Information Vector, or WIV. This approach allows sorting the emissions from each source into streams of WIVs from which individual sources may be selected for attention. Its hierarchical structure is closely analogous to the acquisition and analysis of intelligence from reconnaissance data. The model has been tested successfully in a variety of experiments that replicate responses of human subjects. Of particular interest in speech processing is the ability to extract voice pitch, phonetic segmentation, and voiced/unvoice