Modeling fine time structure in the brain
Ganesh Swaminathan at Starkey Research in Berkeley will be at CCRMA to talk about his work to understand the fine-time structure in auditory signals. The auditory nerve, in particular, has exquistitely sensitive timing information. Could this information be the key to perceiving the complicated world around us?
Who: Ganesh Swaminathan (Starkey)
What: The role of fine-time structure in perception
When: Friday January 19th at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room
Why: We can't really understand perception without knowing how information is represented!
Come to CCRMA and we'll have a fine time talking about perception!
Assessing the role of monaural and binaural temporal fine structure for robust speech perception: Insights from psychophysics and physiology-based modeling
Jayaganesh Swaminathan
Starkey Hearing Research Center, Berkeley, CA, USA
Acoustic signals received by the auditory system pass first through an array of physiologically-based bandpass filters. Conceptually, at the output of each filter, there are two principal forms of temporal information: slowly varying fluctuations in the envelope (ENV) and rapidly varying fluctuations in the temporal fine structure (TFS). The importance of these two types of information for speech perception in challenging listening situations has not been clearly understood. Part of the challenge arises from the fact that the relationship between “acoustic” TFS (extracted using signal processing techniques) and “neural” TFS (coded in the auditory-nerve) has not been considered in the application of TFS-based explanations to speech perception. In this talk, I will present results from recent studies designed to assess the relative roles of monaural and binaural ENV and TFS cues for robust speech perception. The results will be interpreted with respect to a psychophysiological framework to verify that experimental manipulations of the ENV and TFS components of speech are preserved in auditory-nerve representations. Potential implications for auditory prostheses design will be discussed.
Jayaganesh Swaminathan is a Research Scientist at Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Boston University. Ganesh holds a bachelors and masters degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. After obtaining his PhD from Purdue University, Ganesh competed postdoctoral training in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. He then continued at MIT as a Research Scientist and then joined the research faculty at Boston University. Ganesh's research involves the coordinated use of physiology based modeling and speech psychophysics. His expertise involves automatic speech recognition systems as well as auditory electrophysiology, psychophysics and physiology based modeling of auditory nerve responses.