Hearing Seminars
CCRMA hosts a weekly Hearing seminar (aka Music 319). 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. Stanford students can (optionally) receive credit to attend, by enrolling in Music 319 "Research Seminar on Computational Models of Sound Perception." 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 subscribe yourself to the mailing list, please visit https://cm-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar If you have any questions, please contact Malcolm Slaney at hearing-seminar-admin@ccrma.stanford.edu.
Recent Hearing Seminars
A Tour of the Auditory System Courtesy of Eric Young
Date:Fri, 02/23/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarMurray Sachs and Eric Young collected an amazing set of data from the auditory nerve of cats. They played vowel-like sounds to cats and recorded from a large number of auditory nerve fibers. The assembled data tells us a LOT about how the auditory system works. We recently lost Eric Young, as noted below. I’d like to use this Hearing Seminar to honor Eric and his data, and tell his story about how the auditory system works.
FREEOpen to the PublicVarsha Mysore Athreya on Age Effects on Auditory Temporal Processing and it's Relationship to Speech Perception in Noise
Date:Fri, 02/16/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarNormally our auditory system magically hears out the voice to which we want to attend, even in a noisy cocktail party. But as we age we lose this ability, and current hearing aids don't help. What is the cause, and how can we diagnose these changes in our auditory system?
FREEOpen to the PublicMalcolm Slaney on AI for Better Hearing
Date:Fri, 02/02/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarCan AI and DNNs improve our hearing? Conventional hearing aids do a simple job, but still a significant fraction of potential users do not use them. Contrast this with eye glasses which are universally accepted and used. Certainly one issue is the range of difficulties that affect our hearing versus our eye sight. Where an eye glass prescription might include only 3 parameters per eye, it takes many dozens or hundreds of parameters to describe an auditory problem. Think about auditory thresholds, volume limits, synaptopathy, and higher level issues like masking, and sound separation.
FREEOpen to the PublicDiana Deutsch on Two Perceptual Puzzles: Audio Illusions and Perfect Pitch
Date:Fri, 01/19/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarI'm very happy to welcome Prof. Diana Deutsch to Stanford, CCRMA and the Hearing Seminar. Diana has illustrious career at the intersection of speech and music perception. Perhaps most interestingly, how does music gets perceived as speech, and speech perceived as music? We usually think of them as different kinds of signals, perceived differently and with different uses. What do these types of signals tell us about how the auditory system is organized?
Who: Dr. Diana Deutsch (CCRMA and UCSD)
What: Two Perceptual Puzzles: Audio Illusions and Perfect Pitch
When: 10:30AM on Friday January 19, 2024
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (Behind the elevator on the top floor)FREEOpen to the PublicRobotic Hearing Systems for Autonomous Vehicles
Date:Fri, 10/27/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow do we teach an autonomous vehicle to hear? This is an interesting problem both because we expect our cars to hear as well as we do and keep us all safe. We must do it in busy city soundscapes and at 60 mph. All the while preserving the privacy of people not connected with the car.
Dr. Xuan Zhong is trained in hearing science and has been working for self-driving car companies for several years.
Who: Dr. Xuan Zhong
What: Building Ears for Robots: Machine Hearing in the Age of Autonomy
When: Friday October 27 at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room
Why: We will have self-driving cars someday, and we want them to hear usFREEOpen to the PublicKarlheinz Brandenberg - Spatial Sound - HRTFs vs. Room Reverb
Date:Fri, 10/20/2023 - 1:30pm - 3:00pmLocation:CCRMA Stage (Next to the Seminar Room)Event Type:Hearing SeminarCustom Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are the bread-and-butter of spatial sound. From every possible direction, measure the impulse response of sound entering the ear, and then apply that user's impulse responses, via an HRTF, to incoming audio. Voila, you have spatial sound. But are these custom HRTFs necessary?
New data from Karlheinz Brandenburg suggests that matching the room reverb is more important than the user's custom HRTFs. Karlheinz Brandenburg and his colleagues will lead the discussion, illustrated with new data. Could this be true? What do you think?
Who: Karlheinz Brandenburg
What: Spatial sound - HRTFs vs. Room Reverb
When: Friday October 20th at 1:30PM <<< Note special timeFREEOpen to the PublicJosh McDermott (MIT) on New Models of Human Hearing via Machine Learning
Date:Thu, 10/12/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow might we bring modern machine learning ideas to the auditory world? Our auditory system is wonderfully rich, and there are innumerable ways that it can go wrong. There are many models that attempt to mimic the structure of the auditory system, with various levels of fidelity.
But perhaps we can do better by ignoring the details and modeling the auditory system as a black box, via a deep neural network (DNN). We can train the model using data from psychoacoustic tests. Ignoring details like the basilar membrane transmission line, and inner and outer hair cells, and all sorts of brain structures, can a DNN provide a good enough model? Can we use these models to design auditory prosthetics?FREEOpen to the PublicLaura Gwilliams on Computational architecture of speech comprehension
Date:Fri, 10/06/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow do our brains translate sound into language and semantic concepts? How and where do the different types of linguistic concepts (phonetics, words, etc) show up in the brain. And when? What tools can we use to decipher these parts of the brain?
I'm really happy to welcome Prof. Laura Gwilliams to Stanford and the Hearing Seminar.FREEOpen to the PublicAlicia Zuckerman on emotion without audio
Date:Fri, 06/02/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarAn unusual angle this time: How do we convey emotion **without** audio? We're so used to the full range of words and emotion in our audio life. Yet there is a big difference between wow and WOW! Music is primarily conveying an audio message. We love audio.
But not everybody hears audio the same way. We at CCRMA have an amazing collection of experience about how to convey audio emotion. What can you do without the audio? What are you trying to convey and what would you like to convey to people who are hard of hearing? How might you do that?FREEOpen to the PublicProf. Daibhid O Maoileidigh on Making sense of the sensory hearing cells
Date:Fri, 05/26/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow do we make sense of the auditory periphery? It's quite magical. The fastest moving cells in the body transduce nanometers of motion into electrical stimuli that our brain can turn into speech or music. Did I mention the feedback that lets us here over many, many orders of magnitude? To make matters more interesting it’s a dynamic system with plenty of feedback, ensuring that there are many problems to solve. And all of our auditory experiences start here. How does it work?
Who: Dáibhid Ó Maoiléidigh, Stanford Otolaryngology
What: Making Sense of the Sensory Hearing Cells
When: Friday May 26th at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (Top Floor at The Knoll)
Why It all starts at the cochlea and hair cellsFREEOpen to the Public
