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 11AM to 12:30 (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

  • Pierre Divenyi on Phonetic Restoration

    Date: 
    Fri, 04/26/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar

        aaaaaaaaa BUZZ aaaaaaaaaaaaa

     

    If the buzz is loud enough, people will hear a continuous vowel sound. This is known as phonetic restoration.  Al Bregman (author of the tome Auditory Scene Analysis) says that this is an example of old-plus-new. I suspect it is an example of top-down influences.  All examples of the same process that help us understand the auditory world around us.

     

    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Claudia Freigang:Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence for Impaired Central Auditory Space Processing in Older Adults

    Date: 
    Fri, 04/12/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    Seminar Room, The Knoll
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar
    Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence for Impaired Central Auditory Space Processing in Older Adults Claudia Freigang University of Leipzig Aging is associated with a decline in hearing sensitivity as well as substantial changes in the perception of auditory objects – though both phenomena must not occur jointly. Most prominently, older adults show difficulties in understanding speech in challenging acoustic environments. As a part of speech perception, location of sound sources have to be processed in order to assign auditory objects (i.e. speakers) to distinct spatial positions and also to differentiate multiple sound sources (for instance, multiple speakers and transient background sounds). There is evidence that localization performance is impaired in older adults.
    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Jason Bishop on the perception and processing of prosody

    Date: 
    Fri, 03/15/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar
    Prosody conveys information about emotion and the intention of the speaker.  In this way it is much like music---conveying information that is not in the words. We know its there, we know that babies understand it before they understand the words, but we don't really know how it's perceived. And arguably, music is mostly prosody, so this is really relevant to all you music types too!!!
    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Laurel Trainor @ CCRMA Hearing Seminar - Auditory Development in Infants: From Perceiving Music to Social Behavior

    Date: 
    Fri, 03/08/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:15pm
    Location: 
    Knoll 3F seminar room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar
    I will present behavioural and EEG studies showing that infants and young children acquire sensitivity to the pitch and rhythmic structures of the music in their environment without formal training, just as they learn the language in their environment.  I will then discuss the effects of musical training on brain and behaviour and show that such effects can be demonstrated in the first year after birth.  Next I will examine rhythm and the human ability to entrain movement to an auditory beat whether with tapping a finger or dancing with full body movement.  I will present data showing that auditory and motor systems interact in the brain and that these interactions are present early in development.  Finally, I will show that when two people
    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Michael Vorländer - Acoustic Virtual Reality for Perception Research

    Date: 
    Fri, 03/01/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar
     

    We've come a long way since the days when we thought that stereo speakers provided amazing sound playback.  We've out grown 5.1 and even more.

     

    Just what does it take to accurately reproduce a sound field?  Which effects are important?  Why? When do the issues matter?

     

    Michael Vorländer is an acoustics professor from Aachen Germany and is finishing up his visit at CCRMA.  We'll have a real-live discussion, with hyper-realistic 3-d audio, all in real time.

     

    Who: Michael Vorländer (Aachen)

    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Brain oscillations underlying sensory binding and perception

    Date: 
    Fri, 02/22/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar

    Just how is information represented in the brain?  We're all used to rate codes---a neuron fires when it sees something that excites it.  The rate of firing is proportional to how good a match the input is to to the neuron's model. But there is strong evidence that higher-level concepts are encoded with some sort of oscillator, perhaps around 40Hz.  Bernhard will be talking about how MEG and EEG can be used to measure this activity.  Do brain oscillations explain how we group sounds as we parse the auditory world?

     

    Who: Bernhard Ross (Rotman Research Institute in Toronto)

    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Joel Snyder on Auditory and Visual Rhythm Perception

    Date: 
    Fri, 02/01/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar

    We've got rhythm!  But how?

    I'm pleased to introduce Joel Snyder to the CCRMA community. Joel is studying the mechanisms we use to track rhythm. We can bop to either a visual or an auditory rhythm.  But do the two modalities use the same mechanism, or do they track their rhythms separately? How do the clock(s) work?

    Who: Joel Snyder (UNLV)

    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Heather Bortfeld (UConn) on How Infants Learn to Process Sound with a Cochlear Implant

    Date: 
    Fri, 01/25/2013 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar
    Cochlear implants are pretty amazing.  Profoundly deaf patients can hear if you squirt periodic bits of current into their cochlea. Yet, the current implants are pretty crude.  There are not many channels of information to represent the full richness of human sound.
    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Deciphering Room Acoustics

    Date: 
    Fri, 12/07/2012 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar
    While we aren't conscious of how we do it, we humans have an uncanny ability to sense the size of the room from how it sounds. How is this done, and how can we teach a machine how to do it? Nils Peters is an auditory scientist at Berkeley, and he's been studying this problem. I think it's interesting for two reasons: 1) reverberation and our perception of it is an interesting problem, and 2) it is important for our machines (i.e. phones) better understand our auditory environment.

    Who: Nils Peters - ICSI and CNMAT at UCB
    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Your Attention Please: Three important aspects of auditory attention

    Date: 
    Fri, 11/30/2012 - 1:15pm - 2:30pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Seminar Room
    Event Type: 
    Hearing Seminar

    At the next CCRMA Hearing Seminar, I'd like to talk about recent work on auditory attention. As many of you know, I'm very interested in how our brains process sounds in complicated environments. Our ability to understand any speech in a noisy cacophony is known as the Cocktail Party Effect. We still don't have good models of how are brains do this task, but an important component of the process is certainly attention. 

    FREE
    Open to the Public