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
Nat Condit-Schultz on Tempo, Tactus, Rhythm, Flow: Computational Hip Hop Musicology in Theory and Practice
Date:Fri, 11/15/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
Computational musicology is not just for classical music. In this talk, I will review a variety of computational investigations of hip hop based on my dataset, the Musical Corpus of Flow (MCFlow). Using MCFlow, we can characterize the "norms" of rap flow and investigate how they have changed historically, including changes in tempo and the density of rhyme over time. I will also discuss the methodological challenges of computational musicology in general, and hip-hop/pop musicology specifically, and demonstrate tools and methods I have developed.FREEOpen to the Public
Recent Hearing Seminars
Lloyd May on Audio Processing Strategies to Enhance Cochlear Implant Users' Music Enjoyment
Date:Fri, 05/10/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarCochlear implants are an amazing solution to a hard problem. How do you electrically stimulate the auditory system to convey sound to people who are otherwise deaf? This is an example of a brain-computer interface and millions have been fitted to people who have difficulty hearing. They work well enough to allow people to understand speech. It's really quite remarkable. But what about music? What might we do to encode music so that people with cochlear implants can enjoy it? Why is music different than speech, and what parts of the musical signal might be conveyed?
Who: Lloyd May (CCRMA)
What: Designing Audio Processing Strategies to Enhance Cochlear Implant Users' Music Enjoyment
When: Fri, 05/10/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room, Top Floor of The Knoll at Stanford
Why: How do we stimulate our brains with electricity.
FREEOpen to the PublicChristine Evers on Embodied Audio
Date:Tue, 04/09/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarTeaching robots to hear is important and hard. This is true whether you are talking about an arm, a walking robot, or a car. Robots move, generating their own sounds. We wish for our machines to have a full 360 degrees of situational awareness. They are often in close proximity to humans, so the stakes are higher. And we never have enough microphones or a big enough baseline.
At next **Tuesday’s** Hearing Seminar, Prof. Christine Evers from Southhampton will be talking about embodied audio, or how to teach (noisy) robots how to hear. The last time I saw Dr. Evers, she won a best presentation award, and I’m looking forward to hearing her perspective on how to help our machine (overloads :-) hear better.FREEOpen to the PublicA Bayesian model of auditory performance
Date:Fri, 03/15/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Stage (New location this week)Event Type:Hearing SeminarThe auditory system is large and complex. Most auditory models are decidedly deterministic, except for a spiking model. We'll never have enough tests to fully characterize it. Can Bayesian modeling help, summarizing what we know, and providing probability distributions for the parts we do not know?
FreeOpen to the PublicA 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 Public
