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.
Upcoming Hearing Seminars
Audio Quality - How Much is Necessary?
Date:Fri, 02/03/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Stage (Top floor)Event Type:Hearing SeminarHow much do you worry about audio quality? Do you ever have high-enough quality? Does anybody care about audio quality? What is audio quality?
I'm very happy to announce a special Hearing Seminar on audio quality. Join us for a panel of distinguished audio experts who will talk about how they perceive audio, when is the quality high enough, and how do we define quality. Come be part of the discussion.FREEOpen to the PublicImmersive Audio - How much quality is necessary?
Date:Fri, 02/10/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA BallroomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow do we create an immersive audio environment? What is immersive audio? How do we judge its quality?
FREEOpen to the PublicShaikat Hossain - Improving music perception for cochlear implant users
Date:Fri, 02/17/2023 - 10:30am - 12:10pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarCochlear implants (CI) are amazing if all you care about is speech. They convert audio into electrical impulses which are fed into a user's cochlea. Young users can learn spoken language using only a CI. But they are really lousy at representing music. What can we do better?
Can we provide better stimuli so CI users can enjoy music?
Perceptual learning of pitch provided by cochlear implant stimulation rate
FREEOpen to the PublicLudovic Bellier - Music Decoding from ECoG
Date:Fri, 02/24/2023 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarThere has been a lot of work to decode speech signals from brain signal, using intracranial EEG (ECoG), MEG and EEG. But what about music. Does the brain respond the same way? Which parts of the brain respond with a signal we can decode in real time?
Encoding and decoding analysis of music perception using intracranial EEG
FREEOpen to the Public
Recent Hearing Seminars
Source coding of audio signals with a generative model
Date:Fri, 02/07/2020 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarAudio coders have historically taken two approaches: 1) source coders that understand how a signal is generated, often from a vocal tract, and generate representation using a few time-varying quantized parameters, and 2) perceptual coders that capitalize on “flaws” in the perceptual system that drop parts of the signal are not heard.
FREEOpen to the PublicOpen tools for the development and evaluation of hearing devices
Date:Thu, 12/12/2019 - 4:00pm - 5:30pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar*** Date change, now Thursday! Sorrry. ***
There is a wealth of knowledge about how to adjust our hearing, but most of it is locked up in commercial products. Recently the US National Institutes of Health sponsored a research program to develop a suite of hardware and software that are open source. By this means they hope to create a new research ecosystem that can build and test improvements to the current paradigms. And of course the open source ecosystem will make it easier to put new products and ideas into the field.FREEOpen to the PublicDecoding inner speech from intracranial recordings in the human brain
Date:Mon, 11/25/2019 - 4:00pm - 5:30pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarStephanie Martin will talk about decoding imagined speech activity from just brain signals.
FREEOpen to the PublicAuditory Separation of a Conversation from Background via Attentional Gating
Date:Fri, 10/11/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
The latest speech enhancement work has the potential to dramatically change the way we hear the world around us. This new work has dramatically improved the quality and latency of these algorithms, and it has the potential to change the way we hear the world around us, whether we have normal hearing or need assistance. These new systems build highly sophisticated models of speech, and can pick out the speech signal from the noise. Oh, yes.FREEOpen to the PublicAlain de Cheveigne on cleaning up brain data for analysis and decoding
Date:Fri, 10/04/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
Brain signals as measured by EEG, MEG or even ECoG are inherently noisy. Not only are there only a few dozen sensors to measure billions of different neural sources, the electrical environment can change during an experiment. One would like techniques that can pull the signal out of the noise. This can be done with smart forms of noise control, de-trending and signal averaging.Alain de Cheveigne will be at CCRMA on Friday to discuss a panoply of techniques to enable you to find the signals you care about.FREEOpen to the PublicAndrew Oxenham: How far does musical training generalize?
Date:Fri, 09/27/2019 - 3:00pm - 4:30pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
I’m really pleased that Prof. Andrew Oxenham will be here at CCRMA on Friday afternoon to talk about: How far does musical training generalize? This is a special time (3PM) to accommodate his travel schedule. I’m glad we get to welcome him to Stanford.
Andrew has an amazing record studying auditory perception. He has looked at some of the most important problems in psychoacoustics and neurophysiology, with creative and robust experiments.FREEOpen to the PublicLearning Audio Embeddings: From Signal Representation, Audio Transformation to Understanding
Date:Fri, 05/31/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarPrateek Verma will lead a discussion about using embedding spaces, trained using deep neural networks (DNNs), to model and perform amazing feats with music and speech signals. This continues the theme from last week’s Hearing Seminar, where Rohit talked about using DNNs for speech recognition.
FREEOpen to the PublicRohit Prabhavalkar on Modern DNN Speech Recogntion
Date:Fri, 05/24/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarModern speech recognition works really well, especially compared to the HMM approaches of even 10 years ago. Most notably, current approaches abandon the feature calculations, timing models, and language models of yore, replacing them all with a single deep neural network. Amazing, and they work really well, converting millions of hours of speech to text, in all sorts of auditory conditions, in a tiny box that fits in our pockets, for everyday users.
FREEOpen to the PublicTao Zhang on joint attention decoding *and* speech enhancement
Date:Fri, 05/10/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarMachine learning methods have opened up new frontiers in both understanding our brain and measuring what we perdeive, as well as enhancing speech using deep models of speech to allow us to remove the noise. Tao Zhang will be at the Hearing Seminar on Friday May 10th to talk about both of these approaches.
Who: Tao Zhang (Starkey Laboratories)
What: A Joint Attention Decoding and Adaptive Beamforming Optimization Approach to the Cocktail Party Problem
When: Friday, May 10th at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room, Top Floor of the Knoll at Stanford
Why: Cool technologies to let us hear what we want to hearFREEOpen to the PublicGerald R Popelka on Wearable Hearing Devices (Hearables)
Date:Fri, 04/26/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarI suspect the next technological gold rush is going to be in and around the ears. As our devices become more personal they can make better use of human signals, many of which are easy to measure near the ear. Already, I suspect more of us wear devices in our ears than anywhere else on our bodies. What would you like the next generation of computers to do for you? Better sound? Better vocal assistants? Better physiological monitoring?
Gerald Popelka is a professor in Otolaryngology here at Stanford and has been thinking about what might be possible around the ear. Many efforts towards better hearables have started here in Silicon Valley, and this will be a good opportunity to hear what has been done, what people are thinking about, and what is missing.Open to the Public
