Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemThe Effect of Visual Cues on Auditory Stream Segregation in Musicians and Non-Musicians(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2010-06-23)BACKGROUND: The ability to separate two interleaved melodies is an important factor in music appreciation. This ability is greatly reduced in people with hearing impairment, contributing to difficulties in music appreciation. The aim of this study was to assess whether visual cues, musical training or musical context could have an effect on this ability, and potentially improve music appreciation for the hearing impaired. METHODS: Musicians (N = 18) and non-musicians (N = 19) were asked to rate the difficulty of segregating a four-note repeating melody from interleaved random distracter notes. Visual cues were provided on half the blocks, and two musical contexts were tested, with the overlap between melody and distracter notes either gradually increasing or decreasing. CONCLUSIONS: Visual cues, musical training, and musical context all affected the difficulty of extracting the melody from a background of interleaved random distracter notes. Visual cues were effective in reducing the difficulty of segregating the melody from distracter notes, even in individuals with no musical training. These results are consistent with theories that indicate an important role for central (top-down) processes in auditory streaming mechanisms, and suggest that visual cues may help the hearing-impaired enjoy music.
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ItemLearning Pitch with STDP: A Computational Model of Place and Temporal Pitch Perception Using Spiking Neural Networks(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2016-04)Pitch perception is important for understanding speech prosody, music perception, recognizing tones in tonal languages, and perceiving speech in noisy environments. The two principal pitch perception theories consider the place of maximum neural excitation along the auditory nerve and the temporal pattern of the auditory neurons' action potentials (spikes) as pitch cues. This paper describes a biophysical mechanism by which fine-structure temporal information can be extracted from the spikes generated at the auditory periphery. Deriving meaningful pitch-related information from spike times requires neural structures specialized in capturing synchronous or correlated activity from amongst neural events. The emergence of such pitch-processing neural mechanisms is described through a computational model of auditory processing. Simulation results show that a correlation-based, unsupervised, spike-based form of Hebbian learning can explain the development of neural structures required for recognizing the pitch of simple and complex tones, with or without the fundamental frequency. The temporal code is robust to variations in the spectral shape of the signal and thus can explain the phenomenon of pitch constancy.
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ItemApplication of a pitch perception model to investigate the effect of stimulation field spread on the pitch ranking abilities of cochlear implant recipients(ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, 2014-10)Although many cochlear implant (CI) recipients perceive speech very well in favorable conditions, they still have difficulty with music, speech in noisy environments, and tonal languages. Studies show that CI users' performance in these tasks are correlated with their ability to perceive pitch. The spread of stimulation field from the electrodes to the auditory nerve is one of the factors affecting performance. This study proposes a model of auditory perception to predict the performance of CI users in pitch ranking tasks using an existing sound processing scheme. The model is then used as a platform to investigate the effect of stimulation field spread on performance.