The Physics of Hearing

Science and Technology @ UCSB

Humans have an uncommon aural ability: In a room full of people all engaged in separate conversations, we can push aside the extraneous voices and background noise to hear one particular speaker. Similarly, in a music venue, we can enjoy the performance of a soloist as comfortably as we can a full orchestra more than 100 decibels louder.Exactly how this happens — how we make sense of sound — is not fully understood. Scientists who study the biophysics and neurobiology of hearing and the information theory of complex auditory signals are among the group now investigating those underlying mechanics at UC Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP).
Funded by by the National Institutes of Health, “Physics of Hearing: From Neurobiology to Information Theory and Back” is a synergistic research program at KITP that brings together scientists from different fields to study a common topic.
“We have a wide array of scientists, including statistical physicists, neurobiologists, physiologists, computer scientists and mathematicians,” said program coordinator Tobias Reichenbach, a senior lecturer in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. “We expect that these different perspectives will yield significant progress in understanding the neurobiology of hearing and oral communication as well as speech-recognition technology.”
An impressive body of research over the past few decades has shed light both on the biophysical mechanisms used by the inner ear to encode sound stimulation into neural signals and on some of the principles by which those neural signals are subsequently processed in the auditory brain stem and cerebral cortex.
“Nevertheless, we lack an understanding of how a complex auditory scene is decomposed into its individual signals such as speech,” said program coordinator Maria Geffen, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose Laboratory of Auditory Coding combines computational and biological approaches to study the neuronal mechanisms for auditory perception and learning.
During the eight-week ...

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