The adaptive auditory mind

Daniel Pressnitzer (1)

1 ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris

Through hearing, humans and other animals can recognize a large variety of sound sources, navigate complex acoustic scenes, disentangle messages and assess their behavioural relevance. These remarkable feats are currently beyond our understanding and they still exceed the capabilities of the most sophisticated audio engineering systems. In this talk, I will draw upon recent evidence from our lab and elsewhere to suggest that a key aspect of brain function enabling efficient listening is the ability to rapidly adapt, online, to the sounds and tasks at hand. For instance, sound recognition through timbre can rely on rather complex acoustic features that are opportunistic, in the sense that they can be tailored to specific sound categories such as the human voice. Auditory scene analysis (the ability to follow a sound source in a mixture) recruits a widely distributed brain network that focuses the whole chain of processing on the attended stream. This processing is itself labile, as acoustic context can have a rapid and profound influence on basic auditory features such as pitch or vowel quality. Finally, auditory memory is rapidly established, and thus almost inevitably recruited in many listening task. Taken together, these recent experimental findings suggest that adaptive coding could be an integral part of how the human auditory system deals successfully with natural acoustic scenes.

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Daniel Pressnitzer. The adaptive auditory mind. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811397⟩