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 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
Lauren Fink (UCDavis) on modeling pupillary entrainment to music and absorptive music listening experiences
Date:Fri, 02/01/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
What can our eyes tell us about how we hear music? Lauren Fink from UC Davis will talk about how the pupils of our eyes respond to music. Her work shows that the pupil diameter reflects the musical rhythm and whether we are engaged with the music. This is cool, not only because it shows our eyes "listen" to music, but also ties into recent work investigating the connection between auditory salience and eye responses. The eyes have it!
AbstractFREEOpen to the PublicNarayan Sankaran on Decoding Music & Speech from M/EEG activity
Date:Fri, 01/25/2019 - 10:30am - 1:55pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow is that our brains identify the tones and phonemes that make up the music and speech that we listen to? Clearly it’s some sort of neural network, but little is really known about how these decisions are made in our own brains.
I’m happy to introduce Narayan Sankaran, new to the Bay Area, who has been doing a lot of work on measuring how our brains respond to speech and music. Most importantly he is looking at how the brain distinguishes different tones and phonemes. This has been done with single-unit recordings and perhaps ECoG, but it is novel to do this with EEG. And then how do these signals get turned into meaning? Very cool work.
Who: Narayan Sankaran(UCSF)
What: Decoding Music & Speech from M/EEG activityFREEOpen to the PublicPragati Rao on auditory and cognitive statistical learning in musicians
Date:Fri, 01/18/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Seminar Room at the KnollEvent Type:Hearing SeminarAre the statistics of a Beethoven concerto different than rap music? I suspect nobody will argue this point. But what effect does it have on our perception and understanding of music? Do trained musicians have a “deeper” understanding of the statistics of music? Does top-down knowledge about a type of music affect how we perceive and enjoy it? Is there more to statistical models than crafting clever P.D.Q. Bach pieces? Can we measure and see differences in people’s expectations?
FREEOpen to the PublicLes 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 Public
