Audition

Abstract

Audition is the process by which organisms use sound to derive information about the world. This chapter aims to provide a bird's‐eye view of contemporary audition research, spanning systems and cognitive neuroscience as well as cognitive science. I provide brief overviews of classic areas of research as well as some central themes and advances from the past 10 years. The chapter covers the sensory transduction of the cochlea, subcortical and cortical functional organization, amplitude modulation and its measurement in the auditory system, the perception of sound sources (with a focus on the classic research areas of location, loudness, and pitch), and auditory scene analysis (including segregation, streaming, texture, and reverberation perception).

Naturalistic Audiovisual Stimulation Reveals the Topographic Organization of Human Auditory Cortex

“…Our model mirrored the compressive spatial summation model applied to visual cortex 29,29 by estimating a compressive nonlinearity (n). Interestingly, our range of estimated n values were very close to 0.3 ( M = 0.29, SD = 0.10) - a power-law nonlinearity that is consistent with cochlear amplitude compression 1 . We also revealed a gradient of increased compressivity in regions remote from the core, mimicking a similar profile observed in high-level visual cortex, wherein neurons increasingly tolerate low-level stimulus variations and exhibit more category selecticity 29,30 .…”

“…Another divergence is that primary auditory cortex would also occupy a later position in a processing hierarchy than its visual counterpart, since there is a more extensive sequence of auditory than visual nuclei in subcortex 1,2 with comparatively later layers of neural networks best explaining responses in primary auditory cortex 6 . Information in ‘primary’ auditory regions thus represents a relatively processed format of the initial sensory data.…”

“…The principal dimension in which auditory sensations are organized is sound frequency. The cochlea 1 , brainstem 2 , thalamic 3,4 , and cortical 5 centers of the auditory system all exhibit tonotopy : neighbouring neurons with similar spectral sensitivities give rise to a smooth topographic progression of frequency tuning within each region. The primacy of tonotopy as an organizing principle in both the auditory brain 4,5 and artificial neural networks of audition 6 is uncontested, but there is little consensus on the cortical auditory system’s tonotopic structure 7,8 .…”

Modeling Unsupervised Empirical Adaptation by DPGMM and DPGMM-RNN Hybrid Model to Extract Perceptual Features for Low-Resource ASR

“…The lifetime speech perception formation process has been initialized at birth. Before exposure to any empirical speech data, such auditory organs as the cochlea are preliminarily sensitive to the range of frequencies within human speech and insensitive to higher frequencies [22].…”

Learning spectro-temporal representations of complex sounds with parameterized neural networks

“…over the past few years with novel understanding of the representations and processing involved (McDermott, 2018). Slow spectral and temporal modulation built on top of the spectrum have been shown in psychophysical tests to be useful for several audio tasks solved by mammals: they contribute to speech intelligibility (Edraki et al, 2019;Elhilali et al, 2003;Elliott and Theunissen, 2009), they help to boost performance for speech processing in noisy environments (Chang and Morgan, 2014;Mesgarani et al, 2006;Vuong et al, 2020).…”