Hearing Seminars
CCRMA hosts a weekly Hearing seminar. All areas related to perception are discussed, but the group emphasizes topics that will help us understand how the auditory system works. Speakers are drawn from the group and visitors to the Stanford area. Most attendees are graduate students, faculty, or local researchers interested in psychology, music, engineering, neurophysiology, and linguistics. Meetings are usually from 10:30AM to 12:20 (or so, depending on questions) on Friday mornings in the CCRMA Seminar Room.
The current schedule is announced via a mailing list. To be added to the mailing list, send email to hearing-seminar-request@ccrma.stanford.edu. If you have any questions, please contact Malcolm Slaney at hearing-seminar-admin@ccrma.stanford.edu.
Recent Hearing Seminars
Les Atlas (U. Washington) on Motif Discovery
Date:Fri, 12/07/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Seminar Room at the KnollEvent Type:Hearing SeminarRecognition of songs is perhaps the strongest at their elements called “motifs.” These motifs can, for example, be a riffs in rock music. Like the organ part in Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone or the Keith Richard’s often repeated 8 note guitar riff in the Rolling Stones (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. Motifs in classical music take a similar role. They become the passage which gets repeated, transposed, reversed, and modified throughout the piece.
FREEOpen to the PublicTorsten Dau on Using data-driven auditory profiling to scene-aware signal processing for super-human hearing
Date:Thu, 11/29/2018 - 10:00am - 11:30amLocation:Seminar Room at the KnollEvent Type:Hearing SeminarNote, change in plans. Torsten Dau will be speaking Thursday at 10AM. Pragati will be at CCRMA ASAP in the new year!
So, Torsten Dau **Thursday at 10AM****
And Pragati Rao, who was going to speak on Friday, will be leading a discussion of her musical EEG work in January.FREEOpen to the PublicDavid Romblom and Helene Bahu (Dysonics) Structural Head Models for Interactive 3D Audio
Date:Fri, 11/09/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Seminar Room at the KnollEvent Type:Hearing SeminarWith the growing popularity/interest/importance of augmented and virtual reality systems, there is a need for better 3D audio. One of the hardest problems is synthesizing the correct audio, without requiring users to get their head-related transfer functions (HRTF) measured. Nobody wants to sit in a jig and while their ears are probed, and this solution really doesn’t scale.
At this week’s CCRMA Hearing Seminar, Helene Bahu and David Romblom from Dysonics in SF will be talking about their methods to estimate HRTFs from simple physical measurements. Can we generate good enough 3d audio using just the size of the head? And what is good enough?FREEOpen to the PublicSridhar Kalluri on speech-in-noise perception
Date:Fri, 10/26/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Seminar Room at the KnollEvent Type:Hearing SeminarSridhar Kalluri will talk about the difficulty we all suffer in understanding (speech) signals in noise. This is a nice contrast to last Friday’s talk where Brian Malone talked about auditory neurons that performed *better* in the presence of noise.
But overall our ears are not so lucky. Noise and competing sounds mask the sound we want to understand, and our own limitations further degrade the experience. What is it about the auditory system that exasperates the effects of noise, and what can we do about it?
Who: Sridhar Kalluri
What: Improving speech perception in adverse acoustics, what’s hard about it?
When: Friday, October 26, at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (Top Floor of the Knoll)FREEOpen to the PublicBrian Malone (UCSF) on Separating Signal From Noise in Auditory Cortex
Date:Fri, 10/19/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Seminar Room at the KnollEvent Type:Hearing SeminarBrian Malone, a neuroscientist from UCSF, will be leading the discussion Friday on the role of noise in *improving* auditory processing. There is still a lot we don’t know about neural networks, both biological and artificial. Usually we think of noise as being detrimental. But in several cases noise improves performance. In quantized systems, like spiking neural networks, a bit of noise allows the signal to exceed a threshold and generate a signal, perhaps synchronously, so that we can more easily perceive low-level sounds. This is known as stochastic resonance. In machine learning, a random forest of trees combines several different classifiers, each randomly generated, to improve recognition results.
FREEOpen to the PublicMalcolm Slaney (Google) on decoding pitch, rhythmic, imagined, and surprise signals from the brain
Date:Fri, 10/05/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Seminar Room at the KnollEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
I want to discuss the experiments and results from the Auditory Group at the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Cognition Workshop. For many years we have been doing experiments to decode the state of the brain from EEG signals. We’ve been wildly successful at decoding auditory attention, but discovering signals related to expectations, pitch and imagined sounds is harder. This year we succeeded.
Who: Malcolm Slaney (Google)
What Decoding pitch, rhythmic, imagined, and surprise signals from the brain
When: Fri, 10/05/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Where: Seminar Room at the Knoll
Why: We want to know how the brain processes more ecological signalsFREEOpen to the PublicNoah Fram on Detecting Musical Surprisal
Date:Fri, 06/01/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarWhat can be better than surprises and music? Are you surprised? What are the neural implications of surprise?
FREEOpen to the PublicHotword Sifter - Make Google Home hear you in cocktail parties
Date:Fri, 03/16/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarIt's the last unsolved problem in speech recognition. :-) How does one use minimal resources to recognize hotwords like "Hey Google" or "Alexa", in the face of noisy 24x7 environments. These keywords (or hotwords) are the signal to turn on full speech recognition on the new generation of always listening devices, and the hotword must be recognized accurately, and in multiple acoustic environments. Recognizing these keywords must be done on the device, as nobody wants all their speech transmitted to the cloud.
FREEOpen to the PublicHearing Sound with Auditory Hair Bundles
Date:Fri, 03/09/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow is all that beautiful music converted from acoustic waves into spikes? The key biological component are some very sensitive cilia, hair-like structures, that sit at the end of auditory nerve cells. They move in response to passing waves, and that unleases spikes the head toward the auditory brain. It really is quite magical.
Who: Wisam Reid (Stanford)
What: Relating the Cohesiveness of Auditory Hair Bundles in Mammals to their Function
When: Friday March 9th at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (Top Floor of the Knoll)
Why: These are really quite amazing structures.
Bring your cilia to CCRMA and Wisam will talk about how they do their important job.
FREEOpen to the PublicYaqing Su on Neural Coding of Pitch Cues in the Auditory Midbrain
Date:Fri, 02/16/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarNeural Coding of Pitch Cues in the Auditory MidbrainNeural Coding of Pitch Cues in the Auditory Midbrain music perception that pitch??!!?!? And just how do we perceive pitch? After many decades it’s still a source of many disagreements, and much research.
Pitch is critical to auditory perception. It’s an important cue for separating sounds in a cocktail party. It binds a speech signal together so you hear speech instead of a bunch of chirps. Yet, the exact mechanism that our brain uses to hear the pitch of a signal is not known. Yaqing Su will be talking about evidence she has found that suggests that pitch is perceived with a combination of measures, effectively sidestepping the argument about place vs. time. This will be fun.FREEOpen to the Public
- 1 of 11
- ››
