Related papers: The Human Auditory System and Audio
Most sounds of interest consist of complex, time-dependent admixtures of tones of diverse frequencies and variable amplitudes. To detect and process these signals, the ear employs a highly nonlinear, adaptive, real-time spectral analyzer:…
The transduction process that occurs in the inner ear of the auditory system is a complex mechanism which requires a non-linear dynamical description. In addition to this, the stochastic phenomena that naturally arise in the inner ear…
We introduce the concept of self-tuned criticality as a general mechanism for signal detection in sensory systems. In the case of hearing, we argue that active amplification of faint sounds is provided by a dynamical system which is…
A new theory of mammalian hearing is presented, which accounts for the auditory image in the midbrain (inferior colliculus) of objects in the acoustical environment of the listener. It is shown that the ear is a temporal imaging system that…
From the eardrum to the auditory cortex, where acoustic stimuli are decoded, there are several stages of auditory processing and transmission where information may potentially get lost. In this paper, we aim at quantifying the information…
Time-reversal symmetry breaking is a key feature of nearly all natural sounds, caused by the physics of sound production. While attention has been paid to the response of the auditory system to "natural stimuli," very few psychophysical…
The auditory and vestibular systems exhibit remarkable sensitivity of detection, responding to deflections on the order of Angstroms, even in the presence of biological noise. Further, these complex systems exhibit high temporal acuity and…
Humans are highly dependent on the ability to process audio in order to interact through conversation and navigate from sound. For this, the shape of the ear acts as a mechanical audio filter. The anatomy of the outer human ear canal to…
Frequency discrimination is a fundamental task of the auditory system. The mammalian inner ear, or cochlea, provides a place code in which different frequencies are detected at different spatial locations. However, a temporal code based on…
An auditory neuron can preserve the temporal fine structure of a low-frequency tone by phase-locking its response to the stimulus. Apart from sound localization, however, little is known about the role of this temporal information for…
A mathematical model describing the coupling between two independent amplification mechanisms in auditory hair cells is proposed and analyzed. Hair cells are cells in the inner ear responsible for translating sound-induced mechanical…
Natural and artificial audition can in principle acquire different solutions to a given problem. The constraints of the task, however, can nudge the cognitive science and engineering of audition to qualitatively converge, suggesting that a…
Some biological systems operate at the critical point between stability and instability and this requires a fine-tuning of parameters. We bring together two examples from the literature that illustrate this: neural integration in the…
A number of auditory models have been developed using diverging approaches, either physiological or perceptual, but they share comparable stages of signal processing, as they are inspired by the same constitutive parts of the auditory…
Human listeners need to permanently interact with their three-dimensional (3-D) environment. To this end, they require efficient perceptual mechanisms to form a sufficiently accurate 3-D auditory space. In this chapter, we discuss the…
Whether animal or speech communication, environmental sounds, or music -- all sounds carry some information. Sound sources are embedded in acoustic environments that contain any number of additional sources that emit sounds that reach the…
The human ear canal couples the external sound field to the eardrum and the solid parts of the middle ear. Therefore, knowledge of the acoustic impedance of the human ear is widely used in the industry to develop audio devices such as…
Computational and human perception are often considered separate approaches for studying sound changes over time; few works have touched on the intersection of both. To fill this research gap, we provide a pioneering review contrasting…
Human-like environment recognition by musculoskeletal humanoids is important for task realization in real complex environments and for use as dummies for test subjects. Humans integrate various sensory information to perceive their…
Model-based studies of auditory nerve responses to electrical stimulation can provide insight into the functioning of cochlear implants. Ideally, these studies can identify limitations in sound processing strategies and lead to improved…